This history of Mexican architecture has always been conditioned by the memory of how everything began. When the Spanish conquistadors encountered the Aztec empire, its capital, Tenochtitlan, was, according to the accounts of the day, an awesome sight. It was not only in the lake, it was of the lake. Some compared it to Venice. It was razed and rebuilt in the Spanish colonial manner, and formed the kernel of what we know as Mexico City today.

The system of high altitude waterways in the Basin of Mexico, which the Aztecs managed, has mostly been drained and built over since. The population of Mexico City has grown from 2 million to 18.5 million inhabitants in the past 50 years alone. However, this has mostly (with some considerable exceptions) been unplanned growth. Hence the Lakes Project, presented at this autumn's architecture biennale in Venice by Luis-Vicente Flores and Alberto Kalach as a strategic plan to recover Lake Texcoco, the last remaining vestige of the great pre-colonial hydraulic system.

The lake today is described by Flores and Kalach as "a barren landscape of open waste dumps, illegal settlements and flooded plains". It is a wrecked eco-system, but it is, they think, salvagable. Their thoughtful project makes the lake a highly-managed resource which will form part of the city's expansion, rather than act as a barrier to it. Thus an 80-kilometre shoreline will be made available around a lake that will control all the surplus water of the city and even contain a new airport, on an island. The Aztecs, who had to contend with similar problems of rapid urban expansion during the meteoric rise of their empire in the 15th and 16th centuries, would recognize the approach.