Some of the nearly one hundred projects represented in “ad usum: To Be Used,” a survey of six years’ worth of work by Mexico City–based artist Pedro Reyes, are models for environmentally engaged architecture. The rest are perhaps best understood as tools aimed at triggering an enhanced engagement with self and surroundings. These videos, objects, models, records of workshops, and combinations thereof draw on radical theater, psychology, parapsychology, the workings of the market, and an understanding that comedy and grace are intimately linked.

Sometimes Reyes’s tools are Platonic archetypes of