“I really became deflated,” Wilkes explained. “I thought it must be impossible to maintain integrity if this man somehow lost his integrity along the way.”
Yet Wilkes found himself back in politics in 2006, when he won a position on the Borough Council after helping build Quark Park, a temporary garden behind Palmer Square. The product of collaboration between a scientist, an architect and a landscape artist, the park featured more than 20 constructions that attempted to present scientific ideas in ways that would be accessible to the public.
“The park built a lot of community — it brought the University and the town together,” Wilkes explained. “That success ... I thought, ‘That’s what I’d like to capture,’ and so I decided to run for office.” And on Jan. 2, five years after he first got involved in the Borough Council, Wilkes was elected in a close vote as its newest president.
A resident and participant in the community since the 1970s, Wilkes knows Princeton well. He received his bachelor’s in architecture from the University and currently runs the Princeton Design Guild, a local residential architecture practice he founded in 1985.
As an undergraduate, Wilkes was heavily involved with stage and costume design for theater groups such as Theatre Intime and the Princeton Triangle Club, and he worked as a scene painter at McCarter Theatre. In both his junior and senior years, Wilkes chose to live in town rather than on campus.
“I’ve spent 30 years watching the community from inside the University, outside the University, alongside the University,” he said. “I have real insight, and I’m excited to try to get out and advance the discourse on issues in the community.”
Discourse is crucial, Wilkes said, in addressing what he sees as the main obstacle to his goals of maintaining the town’s commercial prosperity and preserving the social fabric of its neighborhoods. That obstacle is a common mindset among the community and the University, where, “whichever side you’re on, it’s ‘us’ and ‘them,’ ” he explained.
“There are a lot of perceived divisions that aren’t necessarily there,” he said. “But the fact is, the faculty and undergrads are residents in the larger body of the town. They have similar interests to enjoy their privileges of liberty or do their work or have lunch, and despite the fact that we do them in different places ... there’s more commonality than difference.”
Wilkes said he hopes to change this way of thinking during his term by encouraging the community and the University to discuss their needs in consideration of one another, rather than in isolation.
“When the University wants to grow, the standard procedure is that the University buys the land, comes to the town, and says, ‘This is what I want to do,’ “ he explained. “The town says ‘OK, you go do that, and off you go.’ What if both decided simultaneously that they wanted grow? Then the designs would be about solving University needs and community needs, and we would have a new strategy about how the University could grow.”
The most recent controversy between the Borough and the University involves the construction of the arts and transit neighborhood, which under the University’s plan calls for changing the location of the Dinky station — a move vehemently opposed by community members.
As an alumnus, Wilkes said, he finds he is able to act as a “translator” for both the University and the community as they convey their needs to each other.
“When I listen to both sides talk about some things, I think they’re closer than they believe — they’re just speaking different languages,” he said. “And because it’s a town of so many smart people, you have so many well-developed opinions.”
Wilkes will find this communication easy, said Audrey Chen, who works in development for PDG, because he himself is “one of those smart people.”
“You can just explain things to him ... He’ll pick up all the nuances of what you’re trying to present or discuss with him,” Chen explained.
Wilkes is currently making an effort to meet more regularly with University students, whom he called an “incredible resource.”
Mendy Fisch ’11, who ran unsuccessfully against Wilkes for Borough Council in the 2008 Democratic primary, said that Wilkes has had lunch with him a few times to discuss his views on several issues.
“I think that illustrates that he cares about some of the issues I brought up,” he said. Fisch is also executive editor for opinion at The Daily Princetonian.
And though Wilkes called his work on the Borough Council “really exciting,” he explained that he is unsure about whether this will be an ongoing commitment, rather than a mid-career venture. Borough Council, he said, is “the nighttime gig and the weekend gig and the lunchtime gig.”
“The fundamental core for Kevin Wilkes is architecture,” he said. “But there’s not another community in the world I think I would spend the effort I’m trying to spend on its constituents than the Princeton community.”
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