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At Lyon, during the period of the Napoleonic Empire, and following upon Jacquard’s invention of the programmable mechanical loom, these looms were surmounted by attachments for the perforated cards. They were tall structures that required new architectural volumes. The Croix-Rousse hill, at Lyon, was covered by new and easily recognisable buildings which incorporated these new volumes, associating housing and workshops in a single unit. There were as many as 8,000 of these characteristic living and production units, but they gradually disappeared during the twentieth century.The Fighiera family worked in one of these units up until 1981. Fully aware of its interest as a place associating living and working space, it gave it to the Soierie vivant association, living silk, which organised visits for the public and demonstrations of weaving on an electrically powered loom of the 1950s. But the condition of the harness linking the 9,600 warp threads to the programming device was gradually deteriorating. How could this loom, which did not have any measure of historic monument protection, be restored to working order? Today, the people who still have the skills to run and repair such machines are all elderly, and the workshop was not a factory with a reserve stock of old looms to be cannibalised for spare parts. It was clear that help could only be found in the contemporary textile industry.Here, the past enters into a dialogue with the present and can be preserved thanks to the innovations of recent years. The renovation of the loom also allowed the realisation of a heritage project involving the weaving of samples based on the programmes encoded in the perforated cards still kept in the workshop, reviving designs fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s.