To become an “ideas” architect, it is hardly necessary to have, say, an idea. You need only get out the word that you consider ideas important, that you decry the absence of ideas among your colleagues, and, before you know it, you’re on your way.

This strategy worked admirably for Raimund Abraham and John Hejduk, and it seems to be working just as well for David Adjaye, a London-based native of Tanganyika, and the subject of “David Adjaye: Making Public Buildings” at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In pursuit of this ambition to be seen as an idea-architect, it has been found helpful never to have actually built anything, on the grounds that to do so would adulterate one’s intellectual purity. In this regard, at least, Mr. Adjaye differs from his predecessors, since, given that he is only 40 years old, he has received a fair number of important commissions.

As for his ideas, it is hard to see what they are, other than that they have something to do with architecture’s interaction with the “public realm.” No architect, though, has ever proclaimed himself uninterested in that realm. Indeed, unless you are building in the desert, it is intellectually difficult and legally impossible to ignore the public realm.

But Mr. Adjaye disavows any claim to originality regarding the public realm. In an interview published in the exhibition cataloge, he modestly allows that, “One isn’t actually saying: Here is a much better pattern of social network and human habitation. What we are looking at here is not a singular theoretical paradigm of human habitation, but multiple levels of human paradigm, which are all equivalent.”

Let us take him at his word. Once we fumigate his discourse of its sundry distractions, we are left with the architecture itself. And here we come up against one of the ineradicable limitations of an exhibition such as the one at the Studio Museum, which is limited to 10 main projects. To appreciate a work of architecture fully, one must stand in it or next to it. Nearly everything looks good in an artfully framed photograph and even better in a rendering. Thus an assessment of Mr. Adjaye’s work, for better or worse, can only be provisional.

One of the paradoxes in the architect’s projects to date, given his discussions of the “public realm,” is that they are most impressive where they are least functional and most ornamental. At the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway, for example, he created a large, perforated box with four sides that stands as a charming architectural folly. Likewise, there is a pleasant play of sunlight among the serried lattices that made up the entrance to a temporary pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale on San Lazzaro degli Armeni, devoted to lighting effects by the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. In both cases, the projects behave very much like autonomous sculptures.

As for his other, more conventional commissions, most are derivative or lacking in energy. Thus the as-yet-unrealized Wakefield Market Hall is a bulky box whose fore-court is adorned with a variety of irregularly set pillars. Here, as in other projects displayed at the Studio Museum, references and allusions to African architecture and patterning are really yet one more unnecessary distraction, especially since the results end up looking suspiciously conventional.

The two best projects on view in the show are the Idea Store, Whitechapel and the Idea Store, Chrisp Street, both in London. Though there is some irregularity in both structures, they manage to relax for the most part into a pleasing rectilineatity. The alternation between clear and variously colored glass along the façade is especially pleasing. The Centre Pompidou-inspired exposure of the guts of the interior is less so, however. And that very name, “Idea Store,” generates unease. It was chosen, doubtless, to suggest that something new and special was taking place within and around the two structures in question. But when all is said, neither one is anything more, or less, than a fairly standard public library. Why couldn’t we have been told that in the first place?

Through October 28 (144 W. 125th St., between Lenox and Seventh avenues, 212-864-4500).