Rainfall buries a huge airport in Mexico

The park’s story begins in 2014, when Enrique Peña Nieto, president Mexico At that time, plans were announced for a new transportation hub for Mexico City. It will be built on the largely dry bed of Lake Texcoco, the body of water that once surrounded Mexico City’s ancient predecessor, Tenochtitlan, the center of the Aztec Empire. The marketing promise was that NAICM would be one of the greenest airports in the world. The station, designed by Norman Foster – winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1999 and the Prince of Asturias Prize for the Arts in 2009 – will be the first station to receive LEED Platinum certificationthe highest international recognition for energy efficiency and sustainable design.

Its site, Lake Texcoco, had already lost more than 95% of its original area, and in 2015 plans were made to drain it completely to build the airport. However, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office as President of Mexico in 2018, he scrapped the plan. It would end up costing more than $13 billion and leave behind serious environmental damage: the unfinished project destroyed a major refuge for migratory birds; The carved mountains of the State of Mexico (the federal district surrounding Mexico City); agricultural land that has been razed; It changed the landscape of the cultural capital of the Nahua, an indigenous people that included the Mexica (or Aztecs).

Echeverría, who says he has been obsessed with the area for nearly three decades, was appointed by the new government to restore the local ecosystem. “I felt like I was stepping on Mars,” says the architect, considering his appointment to head the project. The park covers an area 21 times the size of Mexico City’s massive Bosque de Chapultepec park. Echeverría offers his own comparisons: “This place is three times the size of Oaxaca City, and for reference for those outside of Mexico, it’s almost three times the size of Manhattan.”

The restoration project was not just a whim of Mexico’s new president, but the culmination of a century of visions and plans. “We’ve been kicking around this for 75 years,” Echeverría says, citing restoration projects proposed as early as 1913, including those of Miguel Ángel de Quevedo (a famous environmentalist) in the 1930s and agricultural expert Gonzalo Blanco Macias in the 1950s. What was missing, Echeverría says, “was not a lack of ideas, but political will.”