Rainfall Buries a Mega-Airport in Mexico

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

Its site, Lake Texcoco, has already lost more than 95 percent of its original surface and was planned to be completely drained in 2015 to build the airport. However, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office as Mexico’s president in 2018, he scrapped the plan. It would cost more than $13 billion and leave behind severe environmental damage: the incomplete project destroyed a key refuge for migratory birds; Carving Mountains in the State of Mexico (federal territory surrounding Mexico City); destroyed agricultural land; And an indigenous population that included the Mexica (or Aztec) changed the landscape of the cultural capital of Nahua.

Echeverría, who says he has lived in the area for nearly three decades, appointed the new government to restore the local ecosystem. “It felt like I was stepping on Mars,” says the architect, reflecting on being on top of the project. The park covers an area equal to 21 times that of Mexico City’s massive Bosque de Chapultepec Park. Echeverría offered his own comparison: “This place is three times the size of Oaxaca City, and as a point of reference for people outside of Mexico, it’s 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 dreams and plans. “We’ve been skating around it for 75 years,” Echeverria said, citing restoration projects proposed as early as 1913, including by Miguel Ángel de Quevedo (a noted early environmentalist) in the 1930s and agronomist Gonzalo Blanco Macias in the 1930s. What was missing, says Echeverria, “was not a lack of ideas, but political will.”