The CERN Large Hadron Collider LHC

The Large Hadron Collider Project LHC was approved by the CERN Council in December 1994. Commissioning with beam will start in the second half of 2005. The paper discusses the most important parameters, the general layout of the LHC octants, and the status of the experiments ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. Also described are some aspects of the beam-beam interactions, the transverse coupled-bunch instability, as well as the technical developments of the cryogenics, the tests of half an arc cell, and the new civil engineering needed.