The Canal Café in Venice, Italy. Images by Iwan Baan, courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
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Design Details: Canal Café
- Project: Canal Café
- Location: Venice, Italy
- Size: outdoors
- Opened: 2025
- Design firm: Diller Scofidio + Renfro
- Water Systems Design: Natural Systems Utilities, Sodai
- Photographs: Iwan Baan
Coffee lovers seeking a literal flavor of Venice, Italy, can now drink espresso with water drawn from the Venetian Lagoon.
Part espresso bar, part laboratory and part art installation, the Canal Café in the Arsenale area of the lagoon is part of the Italian city’s Biennale Architettura, the every-other-year architectural exhibition that runs from May through November. It involves a sytem of tanks and filters connecting the lagoon to a mobile espresso station.
New York City-based design firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro led the concept and design, while New Jersey-based Natural Systems Utilities and Italian sibling company Sodai led the water purification system efforts.
“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 that are heightened in an era of mass tourism and climate change,” Diller Scofidio + Renfro said in a design statement shared with DCN. “Canal Café reaches beneath the photogenic surface of the city by converting these brackish waters into the comforting scent and taste of espresso — the irreducible Italian pleasure.”
The purification system combines natural filtration and mechanical filtration to result in clean, potable water, according to the firm.
Water flows up from the lagoon through a transparent pipe and is split into two streams. One flows through a natural membrane bioreactor — described as a “micro wetland” — where salt-tolerant plants facilitate purification but retain minerals. The other undergoes artificial filtration, using reverse osmosis and UV disinfection to produce distilled water.
“The streams are then mixed, steamed, and forced through coffee grounds to produce espresso,” the design firm stated. “Unused purified water irrigates an adjacent landscape installation.”
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