Twenty-five murals
Huge paintings on block façades, some of designs never built.
Gnrc — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Aldg692VX — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Andrzej Otrębski — CC BY-SA 4.0 · ANMARGIE — CC BY-SA 4.0
Yes — they are all on the street and can be walked between freely at any time. The ticket covers only the museum apartment. If time is short, walking the murals gives you most of the experience, but the apartment is what explains life inside these walls.
Southeast Lyon in the États-Unis district, reached by tram and metro from the centre in about twenty minutes. It is off the usual visitor route — deliberately so, since the value is in seeing the Lyon people live in rather than its historic core.
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An open-air museum inside a real residential district in southeast Lyon, devoted to the architect Tony Garnier and to the idea of social housing he built. In the early twentieth century Garnier designed what he called the Industrial City: a conception of a workers' city with decent housing, light, air and green space, at a time when workers lived in crowded quarters without sanitation. This district is what was actually built from that conception. What makes the museum unusual is that it is not a building: twenty-five walls in the district carry huge murals, some showing Garnier's unbuilt designs and some created by artists from other countries. You walk through ordinary residential streets and look up at the fronts of blocks of flats. Alongside them is a museum apartment furnished as it was in the 1930s, entered and explained, showing how the district's residents actually lived. This is a place people live in today, so behave accordingly: do not photograph windows and do not enter private courtyards.
Huge paintings on block façades, some of designs never built.
Furnished to the 1930s — how the district's residents actually lived.
A conception of a decent workers' city, of which this district was actually built.
États-Unis district, southeast Lyon