Tessa Kelly and Chris Parkinson, the founders of Group AU, worked at architecture firms in New Haven, Connecticut, for a few years after getting their master’s degrees (Kelly at Harvard, Parkinson at Yale). In 2016, they moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, establishing their firm the next year. What brought the architects, who are both 37 and grew up in the area, to Pittsfield was The Mastheads, a public arts project with five mobile writing studios, built by the couple, for which they received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Mastheads, completed in 2017, sponsors summer residencies and other programs, providing places for writers to work as it commemorates the famous 19th-century writers who spent time in the city: Melville, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Thoreau, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Says Kelly, “We discovered a unique niche for ourselves—to understand the needs that the community had. We learned how to write grants to support our fees. You don’t have to wait for a client to come to you with fully formed ideas; you can initiate your own solutions.”