In Lyon, the renovation of the Printing Museum is not just about a cultural institution that has been closed for several months. It also touches on how an industry preserves its machines, plates, typefaces, printed materials, and, above all, the memory of the processes that produced them.
Making a Renaissance building accessible without erasing its history
The first challenge lies in the building itself. The museum is housed in the Hôtel de la Couronne, a complex dating back to the late 15th century that served as the seat of Lyon?s municipal government beginning in 1604. The site is located within the Lyon area that has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998.
This layout gives the museum a unique identity, but it also imposes technical constraints. Prior to its closure on June 1, 2025, only part of the ground floor?where the typography workshop is located, among other things?was accessible to people in wheelchairs. The renovation project must therefore install the necessary accessibility features in a historic building that includes galleries, a courtyard, a spiral staircase, mullioned windows, and listed architectural elements.
For visitors, the benefit is immediate: access to the collections should no longer depend on the building?s historical layout. For the project owner, the situation is less straightforward. Every modification must take the building?s architectural preservation into account.
A budget of 5.4 M%C2euros is cited for the restoration project planned by the City of Lyon, with funding from the government under the historic monuments program.
Moving 32,000 objects: A Collections Project Before the Museum Renovation
A printing press, a type case, or a set of woodblocks cannot be moved in the same way as a series of framed posters. The renovation therefore requires a process that is less visible than the construction work itself: the handling and protection of approximately 32,000 objects.
The challenge stems from the heterogeneity of the collections. The museum houses books, typefaces, matrices, printing presses, advertising materials, packaging, scientific archives, antique objects, and contemporary graphic works.
This diversity requires handling methods tailored to the weight, size, materials, and condition of each item. A printing press and a paper document present different challenges in terms of packaging, transport, and storage.
But this move also has documentary value. Removing the collections requires cataloging them, locating them, and rethinking their place in the future exhibition layout. For a museum dedicated to graphic techniques, the project thus becomes an exploration of the production process of the exhibition itself: selecting, documenting, moving, preserving, and then re-contextualizing the works.
From Gutenberg to the Digital Age: How Can We Tell the Story of a Graphic Arts Industry That Has Grown So Vast?
The previous permanent exhibition, redesigned in 2014, was organized into nine sections. It began with the origins of printing before 1450 and continued through the information society after 1950.
The new museum layout must accommodate a body of work that has expanded considerably since the museum?s founding. In addition to the history of books and typography, the collection now includes prints, photography, color printing, advertising, administrative documents, packaging, information design, editorial graphic design, and digital applications.
For printing professionals, this development is far from trivial. It reflects the shift from a trade centered on typesetting and printing to a much broader field that combines design, prepress, image reproduction, printing, finishing, and communication.
The collection dedicated to René Higonnet and Louis Moyroud is a good example. In July 1944, the two inventors filed patents related to photocomposition in Lyon. The museum preserves their scientific and business records, as well as their technical documentation.
The Lumitype Photon embodies this industrial breakthrough. Its 600-gram disk replaces part of the equipment that had previously relied on large quantities of lead type. Behind this relatively compact device lies a shift in the model: typesetting is beginning to move away from physical type.
The value of the new exhibition itinerary will therefore lie in highlighting these shifts without isolating the individual processes. To understand offset printing, photocomposition, or digital printing, one must also know what they replaced.
Machines, dies, and printed materials also tell the industrial history of color
The museum doesn't just house remarkable books. Its collections offer a glimpse into the techniques used to produce printed images.
A significant portion of the collection is devoted to lithography and chromolithography. In the 19th century, these processes contributed to the spread of color images in commercial, advertising, and popular printed materials. The collections notably include chromolithographic cityscapes from regional printing houses.
This heritage is directly relevant to today?s printing and packaging industries. An old label, poster, advertisement, or commercial print already highlights issues that remain familiar in a print shop: color reproduction, registration, reproducibility, choice of substrate, and production costs.
The collections also include woodblocks used to print Bibles in Lyon from the 16th to the 18th century, printing plates, machines, presses, and 20th-century typographic equipment.
The workshop set up in the museum in 1988 extends this approach through hands-on activities. Type cases, lead type, vignettes, and proof presses ensure that the history of printing is not reduced to documents displayed behind glass.
This is beneficial for technical understanding. The downside is from a museum perspective: a machine that has been shut down rarely explains on its own how a workshop used to operate. Educational outreach, demonstrations, and hands-on activities remain necessary to connect the object to the process.
While the renovation is underway, the museum is experimenting with a different way of displaying graphic design
The closure does not mean the end of the museum's programming. The museum has decided to move some of its activities off Rue de la Poulaillerie.
Between spring and fall 2025, excerpts from the Outdoor Journal by Annie Ernaux were displayed in the streets of Lyon. The exhibition The Traveling Museum: Readings by Miyazaki was circulated among the borough city halls from June 11, 2025, through August 2026. Graphic design projects created with teenagers were also presented at the Collège Graphique.
Posters, publications, typefaces, illustrations, and much of graphic design were created to be shared. Displaying them around the city therefore places certain objects in a context that closely mirrors their original purpose.
But this approach also has its limitations. An off-site exhibition cannot replace access to the machines, the ability to compare documents, or the chronological exploration of a permanent collection.
It does, however, allow the museum to maintain a public presence during the closure and to experiment with formats that can inform its programming after 2027.
A change of museum as much as a change of path
The transformation comes more than 60 years after the Printing Museum opened to the public on December 18, 1964. At the time, the museum was closely tied to the history of the book and the work of Lyon?s printers.
Its scope has since expanded. The previous name change, which included the addition of ?Graphic Communication,? already reflected this expansion. Available information now suggests a new name change related to the 2027 project, without specifying the future name.
This goes beyond the question of visual identity. Naming a museum also means defining what it collects and what story it tells.
This issue is of particular concern to professionals in the graphic arts field. From movable type to lithography, photocomposition, computer technology, editorial design, and packaging, the boundaries of the sector have been constantly shifting.
The future name will therefore provide insight into how the institution intends to bring these different fields together under a single narrative.
And after 2027?
The reopening, announced for spring 2027, will provide an initial answer to the question of how a historical museum can showcase an industry whose tools are constantly changing.
But another project is already on the horizon. After letterpress printing, photocomposition, and computer technology, we will need to document the more recent changes in the graphic production process, including digital workflows, automation, new production methods, and the evolution of media.
A printing museum inevitably faces a slight paradox: by the time a technology is added to the collections, workshops have often already moved on to the next one. It is also this time lag that makes this heritage valuable. It helps us understand that, behind every technological breakthrough, the same questions arise: How do we compose, reproduce, print, distribute, and preserve visual information?
