The story of the park begins in 2014, when Enrique Peña Nieto, the President of Mexico at the time, announced plans for a new transportation system in Mexico City. It will be built on the very dry bed of Lake Texcoco, a body of water that once surrounded the Mexican city of Mexico, tenochtitlán, at the center of the Aztec empire. The marketing promise is that Naicm will be one of the greenest airlines in the world. The terminal, designed by Norman who won the Pritzker prize in 1999 and the prince of Asturias Allwaw for the arts in 2009 – will begin to receive the Platinum certificate of Leed, international recognition of efficiency and continuous design.
Its area, Lake Texcoco, had already lost more than 95 percent of its original area, and in 2015 plans were made to remove it completely to build the Airport. However, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office as President of Mexico in 2018, he canceled the program. It will end up costing more than $13 billion and can leave serious environmental damage: The incomplete project destroyed an important refuge for migratory birds; Carved mountains in the state of Mexico (the federal district surrounding Mexico City); he destroyed the agricultural land; and transformed the landscape of the cultural capital of the Nahua, the indigenous people who included the Mexica (or Aztec).
Echeverrría, who claims to have been concerned about this area for almost three decades, was appointed by the new government to restore the ecosystem of the area. “It was like I walked into Mars,” said the designer, who imagines being placed on the project site. The park covers an area equal to 21 times the largest area of Mexico de Chapuldeper Park. ECHEVERRÍA offers his own comparison: “This area is three times the size of the city of Oaxaca and, as a reference for those outside Mexico, almost three times the size of Manhattan.”
The repatriation project was not just a whim of the new Mexican president, but the culmination of years of ideas and plans. “We’ve been at the forefront of this for 75 years,” said Echeverrríka, pointing to restoration projects proposed since 1913, including Miguel Ánglel de Quevedo (a celebrated early environmentalist) in the 1930s and agronomist Gonzalo Macías in the 1950s. What was lacking, Echeverría says, “was not a lack of ideas, but political will.”
