El Parque del Agua / The Water Park
Alday, Iñaki, Margarita Jover, and Christine Dalnoky
Actar / Expoagua Zaragoza, 2008
water 
infrastructure Iñaki Alday and Margarita Jover’s El parque del agua documents the 125-hectare Water Park constructed in Zaragoza’s Ranillas meander for the 2008 International Expo. The project’s premise rejects water as decoration. Water is structure — the organizing logic of circulation, topography, and program. The Soto de Ribera, a white poplar riparian corridor wrapping the site, functions as a “Silver Forest of origin”: a living filter between urban edge and river that predates the park and will outlast it.
Three claims from the Zaragoza project transfer directly to Lahaina’s recovery framework. First, water infrastructure should be visible and integrated into public space rather than buried. Second, “dynamic incompleteness” is a design principle — landscapes completed by time through vegetation growth and flood cycles rather than fixed at opening day. Third, coexistence replaces containment: the park functions as expansion valve during floods, accepting water to reduce risk elsewhere rather than resisting until failure.
The material vocabulary also matters. Alday and Jover describe their approach as “without complexes” — unapologetic use of cheap, available, culturally honest materials. Pump stations wrapped in greenhouse textiles. Parapets in corrugated steel that rusts to match river silt. The implication for Lahaina: recovery need not import expensive finished materials but can draw on local basalt, unpolished timber, and agricultural fabrics that acknowledge the town’s working-class and agrarian history. The Zaragoza precedent also informs the buffer framework’s concept of “daily resilience” — buffers that sit empty and unused will not be maintained properly, and will fail when needed.