Red fox on rock: Community Center, For Harbin Residents with Cooking Facilities and is Quite Communal

Harbin ethnography:


... Not only was this a kind of giving back to Harbin's residents, but everyone cooking together in Fern Kitchen for decades is also a further example of how intermingling residents and guests have been at Harbin, as place, probably since 1972.

The Res. Center (or Community Center for Residents) only was finished in the spring of 2005, when I was a resident at Harbin. It has cooking facilities and is quite communal, in its design and layout, and in the feel of the place. It reminds me of a lot of West Coast hippy commune spaces. There's a piano in it, and a separate living room. No one sleeps there, because Harbin residents live in a variety of other places, in and out of doors on property, as well as in Harbin houses in Middletown. It's right next to the lower part of the garden, and has its own garden area with fruit trees and a fountain. This Community Center also has a large deck. I recently (April 1, 2011) attended a remembrance/memorial ceremony for a long time resident in the Harbin Res Center, and a dinner later that evening for residents only, on the deck, to which I was invited, and which was also in memory of Dee, who had just passed away. Chocolate covered strawberries and lots of delicious sweet things were served at the Memorial Service. In the Res Center's garden, next to the fountain with flowing water, which Bubblemeister made, is a new memorial bench to Dee, with the words' 'Dee – licious' spelled around an upthrusting-rock-out-of-the-stone-bench (Figure). In the Res Center, Dee and I also did a number of interviews for this Harbin ethnography in 2008. The Res Center, as place, represents a space for residents to be together, in which weekly dinners for Residents only on Friday evenings are now beginning to be held.

The decks and the growth of the Harbin pool area, as place, have happened organically, in a Harbin way, and often as spaces for relaxation in the nude. ...













(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2011/03/red-fox-on-rock-community-center-for.html - March 31, 2011)