\n<\/p>\n
The story of the park begins in 2014, when Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto, the president of Mexico at the time, announced plans for a new transport hub for Mexico City. It would be built on the largely dry bed of Lake Texcoco, the body of water that had once surrounded Mexico City\u2019s ancient ancestor, Tenochtitl\u00e1n, 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\u2014winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1999 and the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2009\u2014was going to be the first to obtain LEED platinum certification, the highest international recognition for energy efficiency and sustainable design.<\/p>\n
Its site, Lake Texcoco, had already lost more than 95 percent of its original surface area, and in 2015 plans were made to drain it completely to build the airport. However, when Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador took office as Mexico\u2019s president in 2018, he canceled the plan. It would end up costing more than $13 billion and would leave behind serious environmental damage: The incomplete project destroyed a key refuge for migratory birds; carved up mountains in the State of Mexico (the federal region that surrounds Mexico City); razed agricultural land; and altered the landscape of the cultural capital of the Nahua, an indigenous people that includes the Mexica (or Aztecs).<\/p>\n
Echeverr\u00eda, who says he has been obsessed with the area for nearly three decades, was appointed by the new government to restore the local ecosystem. \u201cIt felt like I was stepping onto Mars,\u201d says the architect, reflecting on being placed at the helm of the project. The park covers an area equivalent to 21 times the area of Mexico City\u2019s enormous Bosque de Chapultepec park. Echeverr\u00eda offers his own comparisons: \u201cThis place is three times the size of the city of Oaxaca and, as a reference for those outside Mexico, it\u2019s roughly three times the size of Manhattan.\u201d<\/p>\n
The restoration project wasn\u2019t a mere whim of Mexico\u2019s new president, but the culmination of a century of visions and plans. \u201cWe\u2019ve been skating around this for 75 years,\u201d Echeverr\u00eda says, citing restoration projects that were proposed as early as 1913, including ones by Miguel \u00c1ngel de Quevedo (a celebrated early environmentalist) in the 1930s and agronomist Gonzalo Blanco Mac\u00edas in the 1950s. What was missing, Echeverr\u00eda says, \u201cwasn\u2019t a lack of ideas, but of political will.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The story of the park begins in 2014, when Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto, the president of Mexico at the time, announced plans for a new transport hub for Mexico City. It would be built on the largely dry bed of Lake Texcoco, the body of water that had once surrounded Mexico City\u2019s ancient ancestor, Tenochtitl\u00e1n, the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[9203,18220,3681,7058],"class_list":{"0":"post-31238","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-buries","9":"tag-megaairport","10":"tag-mexico","11":"tag-rainfall"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}