Winner: Civic and Cultural Interior of the Year 2018 and Winner: Interior Project of the Year 2018. Casson Mann designed the interior of this new cave art museum in France.

London design studio Casson Mann created an entire visitor experience for the new attraction in France, using interactive technology to interpret the palaeolithic painted cave. The London design studio designed a sequence of interpretative galleries and a handheld multimedia guide for the Lascaux International Centre for Cave Art.

The Lascaux IV Caves Museum, designed by Norwegian architects Snøhetta, aims to recreate the experience of the Lascaux Caves, where prehistoric paintings were discovered in 1940. The caves in France's Dordogne region remained opened to visitors until 1948 when the decision was made to close the site to preserve the fragile paintings.

Artists have recreated fragments of the paintings inside the museum, which is kept at a constant cave-like temperature. The team used advanced 3D laser scanning and casting techniques to achieve accurate resin replicas of sections of the caves. Over a period of two years, 25 artists hand-painted 900 metres of faux cave, using the same pigments as those used by the prehistoric painters to recreate almost 2,000 artworks.

Judges comments: "A clear winner, this project is conceptually singular, impactful and emotionally memorable. A very clever and well-considered project."

Designer: Casson Mann
Project: Lascaux International Centre for Cave Art
Winner of: Civic and cultural interior of the year | Interior project of the year
Read more: Casson Mann