CANAL

CAFE

At the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, Canal Café drew water from the Arsenale Lagoon to create the best espresso in Italy with a distinct flavor of Venice.

While the canals and lagoon are the source of the city’s historical wealth and beauty, they also elicit fears of contamination and flooding—concerns heightened by the reality of mass tourism and climate change. Canal Café reached beneath the photogenic surface of the city by converting these brackish waters into the comforting scent and taste of espresso— an irreducible Italian pleasure.

Canal Café was conceived as a part espresso bar, part laboratory, where the installation of a hybrid natural-artificial purification system accelerated the cleansing effects of tidal wetlands, rendering canal water potable and even enjoyable.

A transparent pipe drew water from the lagoon, channeling it through a bio-filtration system to remove sludge and toxins. The water was then split into two interdependent streams: one flowing through a natural membrane bioreactor, a “micro-wetland” where salt-tolerant halophytes facilitate purification but retain minerals; the other undergoing artificial filtration, reverse osmosis, and UV disinfection to produce distilled water. The streams were then mixed, steamed, and forced through coffee grounds to produce espresso, with a distinctive Venetian flavor.

Canal Café received the Golden Lion for the best participation in the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. It built on a proposal conceived for the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008. 

Diller Scofidio + Renfro worked in collaboration with the US-based water systems engineering firm Natural Systems Utilities and the Italian-based environmental and water engineering company Sodai. The project was supported by WeBuild.