A Yellow Bench Is Not a Lifeboat

There's a bright yellow lump of a play structure in Brooklyn built at exactly the height a grandmother can sit on next to her granddaughter, and somewhere in the metaphysical ether, an Indian prince who died in 1966 nods approvingly.Let me back up.The Urban Conga, an award-winning Brooklyn studio sounding like a jazz trio but building public spaces, recently dropped a new playscape into the open ground at Marlboro Houses, a NYCHA campus in Gravesend. Their whole thing, their entire deal as a studio focused on "sparking community interaction and social activity through open-ended play," is refusing to accept play as something you age out of, like braces or believing your parents.The Marlboro project features abstract bright-yellow forms: benches doubling as hills doubling as portals, plus sandpapery textures and a spinning panel of color-shifting film added for the kids who need something to touch, all engineered so grandmothers and toddlers and teenagers avoiding eye contact with both…