at venice biennale, you can sip coffee made from the city’s canals

Venice Biennale coffee uses water from the city’s canals

During the Venice Biennale Architecture 2025, Diller Scofidio + Renfro serves coffee made from the city’s canals. Every cup is served at the Canal Café, the brainchild of the design studio that won the Golden Lion for the best participation in the 19th international architecture exhibition. Here, visitors take a shot of Venice’s canals right into their palate. They can find it at the back of the Arsenale, the place the studio can directly draw the canal water from. It sounds unsavory, but it still has the strong kick of Italian coffee and is very safe to drink. It’s because the design studio uses a water purification system designed to treat canal water and render it potable. The hybrid eco-machine filters the sludge from the canals and removes toxins from the water before using it to make espressos.

After the filtration process, the machine divides the water into two separate but connected streams. In the first path, the water goes through an artificial wetland with salt-tolerant plants and good bacteria. These work their science to clean the water naturally, all the while keeping the minerals in them. As for the second path, it’s where reverse osmosis and UV light treatment take place. The former filters the canal water to remove salt and tiny particles from it. The latter uses UV rays to kill germs in the water. Once the process is over, the water is purified. It is ready then to be turned into coffee made from the city’s canals, served only at the Venice Biennale Architecture 2025.

Canal Café view | image courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro; photo © Iwan Baan, unless stated otherwise

Monitoring system to ensure that the water is potable

There’s a monitoring system that tracks the purification process at the Canal Café. In this way, the coffee made from the city’s canals and served at the Venice Biennale Architecture 2025 is potable at all times. Diller Scofidio + Renfro draws from the city’s Arsenale Lagoon, and quite literally, for the project. Aside from spotlighting the city’s flooding concerns and climate change, the design studio makes use of its café as a working example of how ‘brackish’ water can still be treated and reused.

For the visitors to the Venice Biennale Architecture 2025 and the city who have always wondered what the canal tastes like, there are now cups of coffee served for them to taste it, even though it’s no longer in its original state. Diller Scofidio + Renfro has collaborated with the US-based water systems engineers Natural Systems Utilities for the Canal Café. The studio has also worked with the Italian-based environmental engineering and water engineering company Sodai, as well as Michelin-star Italian chef Davide Oldani and structural engineers Knippers Helbig.

there’s a monitoring system that tracks the purification process | photo © Iwan Baan