The story of the park begins in 2014, when Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of Mexico on the time, introduced plans for a brand new transport hub for Mexico Metropolis. It could be constructed on the largely dry mattress of Lake Texcoco, the physique of water that had as soon as surrounded Mexico Metropolis’s historical ancestor, Tenochtitlán, the middle of the Aztec empire. The advertising promise was that NAICM could be one of many greenest airports on the planet. The terminal, designed by Norman Foster—winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1999 and the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2009—was going to be the primary to acquire LEED platinum certification, the best worldwide recognition for power effectivity and sustainable design.
Its web site, Lake Texcoco, had already misplaced greater than 95 p.c of its authentic floor space, and in 2015 plans had been made to empty it fully to construct the airport. Nevertheless, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador took workplace as Mexico’s president in 2018, he canceled the plan. It could find yourself costing greater than $13 billion and would depart behind severe environmental harm: The unfinished challenge destroyed a key refuge for migratory birds; carved up mountains within the State of Mexico (the federal area that surrounds Mexico Metropolis); razed agricultural land; and altered the panorama of the cultural capital of the Nahua, an indigenous folks that features the Mexica (or Aztecs).
Echeverría, who says he has been obsessive about the world for practically three a long time, was appointed by the brand new authorities to revive the native ecosystem. “It felt like I used to be stepping onto Mars,” says the architect, reflecting on being positioned on the helm of the challenge. The park covers an space equal to 21 instances the world of Mexico Metropolis’s monumental Bosque de Chapultepec park. Echeverría affords his personal comparisons: “This place is 3 times the dimensions of the town of Oaxaca and, as a reference for these exterior Mexico, it’s roughly 3 times the dimensions of Manhattan.”
The restoration challenge wasn’t a mere whim of Mexico’s new president, however the end result of a century of visions and plans. “We’ve been skating round this for 75 years,” Echeverría says, citing restoration initiatives that had been proposed as early as 1913, together with ones by Miguel Ángel de Quevedo (a celebrated early environmentalist) within the Nineteen Thirties and agronomist Gonzalo Blanco Macías within the Fifties. What was lacking, Echeverría says, “wasn’t a scarcity of concepts, however of political will.”