Page 50 - 06_September-2024

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RT OOFTOP GARDEN
o reach Vivian Manasc’s downtown, rooftop home, you have to take the elevator
to the 18th floor — and then walk a bit more up the stairwell. “The art on the walls is to distract you from the fact you’re going up another flight of stairs!” she calls down as I arrive.
Manasc first headed to this city after graduating from McGill University in Montreal in the late ‘70s. “Edmonton was booming, including downtown,” she says. “There were all sorts of opportunities for people to get into the world of design and construction, and it just seemed like an opportune place to be.”
For the last 13 years, the place for Manasc and her husband to be is the top floor of the Cambridge Building in the heart of her favourite city. “We’ve moved around the city over the years, but downtown was always my happy place.”
You wouldn’t call her condo a “happy place” before Manasc bought it — mostly because it wasn’t really a condo. “We were hired by the condo board of the day to do
a study for them to look at the building. And in the course of visiting the building, I discovered this space sitting vacant. It was basically just a big empty mechanical room.”
As an architect, Manasc says, “you always see what isn't there,” and what wasn’t there when she arrived were things like adequate water, light and plumbing — save for about a dozen exhaust vents shooting up from the bathrooms below.
Four new pipes now vent them all well above Manasc’s rooftop patio, which wraps around the south and west sides of the building and brings her sunflower garden closer to the sun. Two lengths of openable fibreglass curtain walls enclose the indoor space, which help moderate the year-round temperature and allow natural light to illuminate her home’s long seating areas and the art, including her grandchildren's, adorning every wall.
Not everyone can design their own place in one of the city’s coolest spots from scratch. But Manasc wanted a marquee spot in central Edmonton for a reason.
“The pandemic has changed downtown a lot, and so the whole conversation about more people moving downtown shifted. Hopefully it'll shift back in the next few years towards making downtown a better place to live. So that was really part of the intention, to create a larger conversation about life downtown and how great it can be.” HT