At the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Diller Scofidio + Renfro introduce Canal Café, an unexpected and provocative installation that invites the public to literally drink Venice. Located within the Arsenale, this experimental espresso bar converts lagoon water into purified water used to make what may be the most distinctive espresso in Italy.
The concept is both playful and profound. While Venice’s canals have long symbolized the city’s beauty and cultural wealth, they are also tied to more sobering associations, pollution, flooding, and environmental vulnerability. Canal Café reclaims these waters, treating them as both a resource and a metaphor. The installation asks visitors to engage with the city’s ecological challenges not just visually, but sensorially, through taste and scent.
The café is part espresso bar, part working laboratory. A transparent pipe visibly draws water from the Arsenale lagoon, guiding it into a hybrid purification system that combines natural and artificial processes. This “eco-machine” replicates the cleansing power of tidal wetlands while accelerating and controlling the process to make the water potable.
The water is split into two interdependent streams. One flows through a natural membrane bioreactor, a micro-wetland populated by salt-tolerant halophytes that filter out contaminants while preserving the mineral profile of the lagoon. The second stream undergoes artificial purification through reverse osmosis and UV disinfection, producing distilled water. These streams are recombined, steamed, and passed through finely ground coffee to produce espresso.
The result: an espresso with the unmistakable flavor of Venice, not metaphorically, but literally. The unused purified water does not go to waste; it irrigates an adjacent landscape installation, continuing the café’s loop of transformation and reuse.
Canal Café is a collaboration between Diller Scofidio + Renfro, US-based water systems engineers Natural Systems Utilities, and the Italian environmental engineering firm Sodai. The project turns an ordinary cultural ritual, drinking espresso, into an act of ecological reflection. It encourages visitors to look beyond Venice’s postcard image and engage directly with its hidden systems, its vulnerabilities, and its potential for renewal.
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