The LHC project - overview and status

In this talk we give a brief update on the status of the LHC project as of July 2004, three years before machine and detector commissioning and first collisions. A recent, compact overview of the various aspects of the LHC project (physics case, collider, experiments, computing) can be found in the Proceedings of the symposium celebrating the 30th anniversary of the discovery of neutral currents and the 20th anniversary of the discovery of the heavy vector bosons. A more recent, but less complete, report has been published.