Over dinner on the eve of Making In, the annual design symposium, on a rambling produce farm near Cork, Ireland, host Joseph Walsh was describing the site’s new Hedge Theatre, a sunken amphitheatre that would be inaugurated the following afternoon with a rousing spectacle of kabuki. When the question of stage lighting came up, Walsh mentioned the floodlights. But many of his fellow diners – including the Pritzker-winning architect Shigeru Ban – were Japanese, and they insisted the stage be surrounded, per tradition, by firelight. Ban scribbled a design on the back of a menu and twisted the paper into a cone, like a torch. The following afternoon, six torches appeared around the stage, built that morning to his specifications.
