“A park needs time and an Expo is an emergency” EL PAIS, ELENA SEVILLANO - Madrid - 14/06/2008

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/parque/necesita/tiempo/expo/urgencia/elpepisoc/20080614elpepisoc_8/Tes

The architect Iñaki Alday (Zaragoza, 1965) has designed the Metropolitan Water Park with his partner Margarita Jover and landscape architecte Christine Dalnoky: 120 hectares of green living legacy and next to the Ebro leaves the Expo Zaragoza. All of them have worked, says Alday, on the same line.
Question. What line?
Response. We are not impoed on landscape; we bring a new vision of what was already there: the old channels [the riverside area was an orchard area] are transformed into channels that we use to grassland or other rafts.
Q. You have designed a natural treatment system.
R. We capture water from the Ebro, Gállego and groundwater, and decant and oxygen through green filter, gravel and vegetation, bathing in natural pools offered by the municipal park, where they try to avoid chemical treatments . Partly it goes to irrigation and another is returned to river.
Q. How do you reconcile nature with barrage of visitors?
R. There is a careful gradation between the artificial and nature, from areas near the urban edge equipment, harder and noisy [With spa, white water channel, mini golf, apartment] to areas increasingly soft, delicate vegetation. In the riparian forest are almost untouched areas of natural park.
Q. Has been an advantage to being from Zaragoza to understand the environment?
R. Our experience in the recovery of the banks of the Gallego has served more, to let us know the characteristics of Mediterranean river.
Q. Where flooding plays an important role.
R. Is necessary, the need of periodic flooding groves that supply. The park is flooded every year and is ready for it. The riparian forest, for example, has alternative routes depending on how you grew River.
Q. Have you also been a time trial to finish this park?
R. Artificial processes can be accelerated, but if something needs a garden is time and patience. And the Expo is, by definition, an emergency. We had to find the midpoint.
Q. You has walked though it a few hours before the inauguration. What impression has been given?
R. Is born, almost without end. But I think it will be the place where people from Zaragoza will come, although they don’t enter in the Expo.