The Rivanna River Baths are conceived of as an objective stage set; a low-tech intervention that occupies the intersection of people, water, and land, creating a common ground for the unscripted interactions to take place between people and water, water and land, and people and each other.

The Rivanna River Baths celebrate the dynamism of the floodplain upon which they are situated, creating a place where people can interact with and experience water–its ebbs and flows, its change in state, its change in temperature, its stage within the water cycle.  The Rivanna River Baths seek to draw water up from the river and people down from higher ground.  It is at this intersection of the two separate paths of water and people that the experience of the Rivanna River Baths takes place.  And as such, the experience will be delightfully inconsistent and unscripted, leaving the public with a curiosity to see what it might be like tomorrow.