Drinking Venice: Diller Scofidio+ Renfro’s Canal Café
At the heart of Venice, where water is both the source and the background of life, Canal Café by Diller Scofidio + Renfro invites the public to drink the city — quite literally, and wins a Golden Lion for its provocative symbolism.
Presented as part of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia under the curatorial theme Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., Canal Café transforms the iconic Venetian lagoon from a romantic backdrop into a material character. More than a conceptual installation, it is a functioning espresso bar that serves coffee brewed with water drawn directly from the Arsenale’s brackish canals—meticulously purified and delicately processed. This radical gesture earned the installation the Golden Lion for Best National Participation, standing out for its audacity, sensory immersion, and provocative symbolism.
Canal Café blurs the boundary between art, science, and infrastructure. It draws from Venice’s long-standing narrative—a city literally and metaphorically shaped by water — while addressing urgent concerns of contamination, climate change, mass tourism, and the environmental instability that threatens its survival.
The installation makes public a process typically hidden underground or behind closed systems. A transparent pipe plunges into the lagoon, channeling water through a hybrid natural-artificial purification system on full display. Here, architecture becomes performance. Visitors watch as the murky canal water is filtered, disinfected, and transformed into clean drinking water—ultimately emerging as the foundation for a perfect shot of espresso.
Coffee as Collective Ritual
Diller Scofidio + Renfro, celebrated for projects that reimagine the civic realm (from the High Line in New York to The Broad in Los Angeles), turn one of Italy’s most cherished rituals — coffee drinking — into a layered act of reflection. Espresso, the “irreducible Italian pleasure,” is no longer a casual habit. In Canal Café, it becomes a distilled experience of place.
As co-founder Elizabeth Diller explains, “In Venice, water is everywhere, but it’s also a threat. What happens when the very source of anxiety becomes the ingredient of comfort? Can we trust what’s been purified, and can architecture change our perception of it?”
The Technology Behind the Taste
The purification system is a collaboration between Diller Scofidio + Renfro and two specialized engineering partners: Natural Systems Utilities (US) and Sodai (Italy), with support from Italian infrastructure group WeBuild.
The design divides the water into two interdependent streams. One passes through a “micro-wetland” membrane bioreactor populated with halophytic (salt-tolerant) plants that naturally filter out contaminants while retaining essential minerals. The other undergoes advanced artificial treatments: reverse osmosis, UV sterilization, and carbon filtration, producing water of laboratory-grade purity. The two streams are then recombined to achieve the ideal mineral balance for espresso—mirroring how baristas fine-tune water to highlight flavor.
Leftover purified water irrigates a surrounding garden installation, underscoring the cyclical, regenerative vision at the heart of the project.
More than a feat of environmental engineering, Canal Café is a provocation—challenging the public to confront their anxieties around ecology, trust, and consumption. It asks: Can we build systems that are not just sustainable, but legible and inspiring?
At a moment when water scarcity and contamination dominate global discourse, Canal Café repositions architecture as a medium for both imagination and solution-making.
In the end, the installation is not just about drinking Venice. It’s about rethinking how we live with water, and how cities of the future might turn their greatest vulnerabilities into their most vital assets.
Canal Café is open to the public at the Arsenale as part of the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture through November 2025.
