The park’s history begins in 2014, when Enrique Peña Nieto, then president of Mexico, announced plans for a fresh transportation hub for Mexico City. It was to be built on the largely dehydrated bed of Lake Texcoco, a body of water that once surrounded Mexico’s historic ancestor, Tenochtitlán, the center of the Aztec Empire. Marketing promised 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 Art in 2009 – was to be the first to receive LEED platinum certificatehighest international recognition for energy efficiency and sustainable design.
Its home, Lake Texcoco, has already lost more than 95 percent of its original surface, and in 2015 it was planned to be completely drained for the construction of the airport. However, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office as president of Mexico in 2018, he canceled this plan. It would cost more than $13 billion and cause grave environmental damage: the unfinished project destroyed key migratory bird refuges; carved mountains in the state of Mexico (the federal region surrounding Mexico City); razed agricultural land; and changed the landscape of the cultural capital of the Nahua, the indigenous people that comprise Mexico (or the Aztecs).
Echeverría, who says he has been obsessed with the area for almost three decades, was appointed by the fresh government to restore the local ecosystem. “I felt like I had stepped onto Mars,” says the architect, recalling the fact that he was at the helm of the project. The park covers an area 21 times larger than the huge Bosque de Chapultepec park in Mexico. Echeverría offers his own comparisons: “This place is three times the size of Oaxaca City and, as a point of reference for non-Mexicans, it is about three times the size of Manhattan.”
The renovation project was not a mere whim of Mexico’s fresh president, but the culmination of a century of visions and plans. “We have been studying this for 75 years,” says Echeverría, citing restoration projects proposed as far back as 1913, including those of Miguel Ángel de Quevedo (a famed early environmentalist) in the 1930s and agronomist Gonzalo Blanco Macías in the 1950s. Echeverría argues that “there was no lack of ideas, but of political will.”