Every year, artists, architects, and designers flock to Venice, Italy for an international cultural exhibition called the Venice Biennale.
Leaders in their fields show off innovative designs and artworks, but this year, visitors have received a show-stopping invitation: Drink a shot of espresso made from the city’s canal water.
Canal Café, a creation of United States-based engineering firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is labeled “part espresso bar, part laboratory.”
Using an innovative “hybrid natural-artificial” purification system, the group’s system draws water from the Arsenale Lagoon to create potable water, and therefore, drinkable coffee.
“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,” the project’s creators shared in a statement.
“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 public will drink Venice.”
This is a pretty bold assertion, considering the canal waters are not normally safe to swim in — let alone drink.
But the filtration system, which includes transparent pipes to show people the full process in full, draws water from the canal system and sends it through a bio-filtration system that removes sludge and toxins. From there, the water is split into two interdependent streams.
The first stream flows through a natural bioreactor, which designers call a “micro-wetland,” which includes plants and bacteria that purify the water while still retaining the water’s mineral composition.
The second stream flows through an artificial filtration system that uses ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis membranes to create distilled water stripped of salts and brings out the flavor of coffee grinds.
Lastly, the two streams are blended, steamed, and forced through coffee grounds, bringing in mineral-rich, naturally filtered water to produce espresso. Unused purified water will irrigate an attached landscape installation.
According to Diller Scofidio + Renfro co-founder Elizabeth Diller, the process makes the coffee not only drinkable, but desirable.
“What we’re doing is we’re reaching into the canal there with that pipe,” Diller said at the launch of the project.
“We’re bringing that water, we’re pumping it up, and we’re purifying it in front of your eyes,” she told Dezeen. “And then we’re going to steam it and we’re going to force it through coffee grinds to make the best espresso, at least in Venice.”
These espressos will be sold for 1.20 euros, or $1.36, the same as all other coffee bars inside the annual event.
Aside from creating a uniquely delicious cup of espresso, designers hope the project encourages the public to rethink water usage and embrace circular design.
“We wanted to bring a sort of shock and disgust at the same time as deep pleasure — the pleasure of drinking beautiful coffee in a beautiful place,” Diller added to Dezeen. “That juxtaposition is very, very important to us.”
The company worked with U.S. company Natural Systems Utilities and Italian environmental and water engineering company Sodai to bring this project to life. They are also collaborating with Michelin-starred chef Davide Oldani.
Oldani will sample the combination and alter it to produce a distinct local flavour, as well as selecting the coffee blend to “deliver the most authentically Venetian taste,” according to Time Out.
While the canal water coffee project offers a fair dose of absurdity and novelty, the designers of this project have serious motivations, especially as rising sea levels threaten Venice’s very existence. Some scientists predict that the city itself could be entirely underwater by 2150.
“We’re in an era of mass tourism and climate change,” Diller told Dezeen. “It’s bound to get worse, so we have to think about infrastructure, about distributed infrastructure, and about the potential to do this and also use natural systems to do this.”
Carlo Ratti, the director of 2025 Biennale, echoed this sentiment to The New York Times.
“We could say that the project is a prototype of the global dilemmas we face in a time of increased climate change when our infrastructures must adapt,” Ratti said.
“It’s a challenge we take seriously,” he said. “The idea is to bring a complex environmental issue — water quality — into the simplest acts of our everyday life.”
Diller, who said she would drink the first cup of espresso as the project’s “guinea pig,” said the whole system boils down to combining the pleasure of a beautiful cup of coffee with the complexity involved in actually having potable water available to drink it.
“It’s visceral — to drink or not to drink — and will provoke people to confront the issue that is literally right in front of them,” Ratti added.
“You’re not just hearing about polluted water and infrastructure failure — you’re drinking a cup of coffee that started as lagoon sludge.”
Header image by Vladimir Srajber / Pexels
