TAKE TEN WITH CASSIE WESTBROOK

Mar 26

Cassie Westbrook represents the next generation of Westbrooks at QuarryHouse. Since March is Women's History Month, we wanted to get her unique perspective on growing up and working in the male-dominated stone masonry world. As a project manager, she comes to Construction Management via Theatrical Stage Management and a classical art and architecture background. Her BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design serves her well, juxtaposing the designer’s artistic vision with the stone masonry's technical knowledge.

QH: Who is your ideal client?

CW: My ideal client is in love with stone. Deeply, passionately, and completely. From the geology aspect through to informed application. They love the natural inclusions that arise from a millennium's pressure on base elements that transform it into endless color, texture, and story patterns. They thrill at the raw chaos of cutting into the earth's layer cake and embracing each variation as a feature instead of a flaw. They are more invested in the artisan craft of what we do than taking joy in debating budgets. My ideal client recognizes that my highly skilled crew of artisan stonemasons are genuinely talented craftsmen and masons who care deeply and profoundly about the stone art they build.

QH: What are the pros and cons of being in a family business?

CW: The pros and cons of being in a family company are often different sides of the same coin. My brother, Dillon, and I grew up in and around the company. I have guys on my crew who remember me running around our Christmas parties in pigtails. For much of my childhood, my dad's office was at our house. We were constantly surrounded by stone and the building of this company as we grew up. Many puzzle pieces go into developing a niche artisan company serving such a specific craft. We learned this alongside our ABCs. The fluidity with which it has existed in our lives can make putting it down and just being a family together challenging. My partner and Dillon's wife will often, lovingly and hilariously, call us back from the edge if we start talking about work too much at family gatherings. I don't think we would succeed at all without a healthy and robust sense of humor.

QH: How has your background in Theatrical Stage Management influenced your approach to managing stonework projects?

CW: Management in all fields involving collaboration has similarities. The fundamental tools of working in theatrical stage management are a recipe of detail tracking and communication to bring a production to completion. The ability to translate information and track multiple elements through an actual timeline is essential in construction and stage management. Lighting designers, set designers, directors, and actors speak in different vernaculars about the same show, and the same is true in construction.

Clients, Designers, Engineers, and Stone Masons will talk about the same project using slightly different language, and everyone's stakes are equal. All teams involved will believe their contribution is the most important, and the reality is that everyone in one way or another is correct. While the performing arts and media get the highest reputation for employing "divas" and "eccentrics," I can tell you, having worked at length in both, that the only difference is in the amount of publicity one gets over the other.

QH After growing up in Marin, what was it like to go to school at the Savannah College of Art and Design?

CW There was an environmental shock in going from being raised in Marin to attending college at Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia that happened on many levels. While I'm deeply grateful to have been raised in California, I have found over time that having lived in the South for several years was an invaluable experience. I remember packing nothing but "light-weight" clothing, assuming, based on movies, that the South was only hot and humid and never cold. I remember driving over a bridge with my mother to get supplies for my dorm room and seeing a sign "bridge may ice in winter." In a split second, it occurred to me that I knew nothing about the place where I had just moved.

I had assumed that going to art school meant that while I was in the South, I would still be surrounded by leftist liberal idealists like myself. The reality was a bit more complicated; I was in a private liberal arts school that was young and striving to be taken seriously with a very conservative background. While excellence, skill, and creativity were encouraged, there were spoken and unspoken limits around what the governing board would allow in terms of expression. The school's cost was prohibitive and meant a genuine class divide in who had access to the school at all.

I am grateful that I had a co-producer for my student-run theater company who got us involved working with the community theater groups in town. It was there and working at a local middle school teaching theater that I learned from the folks who lived and grew up in Savannah what the city meant to them. My Georgia experience mainly taught me that the broad sweeping generalizations I learned growing up would never be as valid as the complexity of abundant moments that make up a place.

QH: What is it like to be a female project manager in the male-dominated world of stone masonry?

CW: Generally speaking, stone masonry and construction are fascinating fields to watch as a lens into society’s shifts in confronting sexism and misogyny. In an industry almost as old as sexism itself, the deeply entrenched gender bias’ ranges from painfully obviously aggressive to well-intentioned ignorance. I have had men say things to me “on-site” that were so dumbfoundingly sexist and obtuse that it took me time even to register what had come out of their mouths. Over the last 15 years of working in and out of this industry, I would say it is improving; it is less common for me to experience immediately being discounted when I walk on to a site simply because I am a woman. I credit the improvement to the other women pioneering in this industry for longer than I have and the increase of women in the field.

When I first joined the family company when I was 22 and in sales, it was significantly harder to be taken seriously. The older generation of men in the field had little experience interacting with a woman who was not coming purely from the design side of things. I took a break from construction in my mid-twenties. I was in part tired of being constantly asked for a male voice to affirm any information or opinion I was offering. Coming back in my 30’s, I have found that the respect I receive is more related to my experience and knowledge and questioned less because I am a woman. It took me time to win trust with my crew, who were up against their cultural training and the cognitive dissonance of having known me since I was a child. My understanding and appreciation for stone and their craft have given us a mutual foundation of respect. In stone masonry, I have found the mutual love of stone, domestically and abroad, to be a shared affinity that can supersede bias.

QW: How do you maintain a work/life balance?

CW: I think a work/life balance is impossible under capitalism as it currently exists. A swinging pendulum that one gets accustomed to surfing, with the hopes of not falling off one side or the other, is the best achievement right now.

QW: Favorite city to recharge pre-covid?

CW: My favorite place to recharge is the woods and mountains. My favorite cities would have to be Florence, Barcelona, and New York, but there are still so many I have not had the opportunity to travel to yet. When travel is safe again, my partner and I are planning on Berlin and Iceland next.

QW: A skill you’re working on mastering?

CW: Cooking. I think of mastery as the accumulation of failures, and I find cooking an excellent meditation in mastery.

QW: The most adventurous thing you’ve done in your life?

CW: I think the most adventurous thing I have done in my life was Scuba Dive with Sharks. I am deeply petrified of them, but in reality, they are stunningly beautiful.

QH: How do you define beauty?

CW: Beauty is compassion, tender holding of the space between the known and the unknown, curiosity, and deep listening.