“The Beast” is a miraculous feat of carpentry, imagination and recycling. It’s a bold exercise in spiritual and structural faith. It’s an inspired summoning of metaphors and contradictions.

The first of those contradictions may be that building a giant walk-in beast sounds like a terrible idea but turns out to be a brilliant one. Inhabitable figurative sculptures are rare in the history of art — Nikki de Saint Phalle’s enormous, reclining woman of 1966, whose interior rooms could be entered from between her legs, and the Statue of Liberty, accessed more discreetly, are two of the few. What these monuments lacked in subtlety they gained in potency — one as a symbol for feminism and fertility, the other for democracy and freedom — all the more so because of the bodily experience of being inside them.

So it is with Preus’s “The Beast,” a formidable creature if ever there was one — except that the poor thing seems to be taking shelter in the Art Center, curled up in a corner of the gallery, nursing invisible wounds. His pelt is dull, his horns bandaged, his eyes heavy with exhaustion and suspicion.

What ails him? Well, there’s the collapse of the financial markets. (He’s a bull, after all. His wee bronze cousin of Wall Street continues to charge along, as bull-headed as ever.) There’s the closing of dozens of Chicago public schools in predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods on the south and west sides of the city. (Six semi-loads of materials from shuttered CPS buildings were routed to Preus’s studio instead of the landfill.) There’s the general dearth of truly public places in North America, land of exurbs and highways. (The belly of “The Beast” has become not just a site for a thoughtful mix of programming but for potlucks, lectures and conferences that attend to the topic of public space itself.) There’s surely more, too, given the complex politics, economics and morals that have contributed to the above situations.

But here’s the extraordinary, marvelous contradiction of it. Despite these burdens, “The Beast” pulses with life and spirit from within. Graffiti-scarred tables become soaring walls. A pair of scrappy metal school desks and chairs finds carefree life as a swing built for two. Leftover bits of wood puzzle their way into neat cubes that serve as handy stools, end tables or whatever else is needed. Worn and stained leather upholstery, strung and stretched from ad-hoc frames, hang like pelts hunted in the new wilderness, waiting for their calling. Even junk mail vibrates afresh, covered in psychedelic doodles and theoretical scribbles.

The principle of reuse is hard at work here, finding redemption for “The Beast” and his many ills by refusing to waste resources. Be they surplus materials, underutilized human energy or potential community space, here they are reinvented and reinvigorated, though always with traces of their history intact. Things have lives too, and here they retain them, lending “The Beast” decades of experience, perhaps even some ghosts, even though he is technically just a few months old.

The effort has been enormous. It is also naturally ecological and inherently optimistic. To make a new world out of scraps of the old conserves limited primary substances, and it must do so out of a profound belief in the possibility of creating a better world through conscientious doing and making. Otherwise why bother?