Rains bury a mega airport in Mexico

The history of the park begins in 2014, when Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of Mexico announced plans for a new transportation hub for Mexico City at the time. It would be built on the largely dry bottom of Lake Texcoco, the body of water that once surrounded Tenochtitlán, the ancestor of Mexico City and the center of the Aztec Empire. The marketing promise was that NAICM would be one of the most environmentally friendly airports in the world. Designed by Norman Foster – winner of the 1999 Pritzker Prize and the 2009 Prince of Asturias Prize for Art – the terminal was expected to be the first to win the contract LEED Platinum certificationthe highest international recognition for energy efficiency and sustainable design.

Its location, Lake Texcoco, had already lost more than 95 percent of its original area, and in 2015 plans were made to completely drain it for the construction of the airport. However, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office as Mexican president in 2018, he canceled the plan. It would ultimately cost more than $13 billion and leave severe environmental damage: The incomplete project destroyed an important refuge for migratory birds; carved mountains in the State of Mexico (the federal region surrounding Mexico City); destroyed agricultural land; and changed the landscape of the cultural capital of the Nahua, an indigenous people that includes the Mexica (or Aztecs).

Echeverría, who says he has been obsessed with the area for nearly three decades, has been tasked by the new government with restoring the local ecosystem. “It felt like I was stepping on Mars,” says the architect, reflecting on his leadership of the project. The park covers an area 21 times the area of ​​the huge Bosque de Chapultepec park in Mexico City. Echeverría offers his own comparisons: “This place is three times the size of the city of Oaxaca and, for reference for those outside Mexico, about three times the size of Manhattan.”

The restoration project was not a mere whim of Mexico’s new president, but the culmination of a century of visions and plans. “We have been dealing with this for 75 years,” says Echeverría, pointing to restoration projects proposed as early as 1913, including projects by Miguel Ángel de Quevedo (a famous early environmentalist) in the 1930s and agronomist Gonzalo Blanco Macías in the 1950s. What was missing, says Echeverría, “was not a lack of ideas, but a lack of political will.”