GUM is a shopping center in Moscow, Russia. It was also the main department store in many cities of the former Soviet Union; similarly named stores operated in some Soviet republics and in post-Soviet states.
The most famous GUM is the large store facing Red Square in the Kitai-gorod area – itself traditionally a mall of Moscow. Originally, and today again, the building functions as a shopping mall. During most of the Soviet period it was essentially a department store as there was one vendor: the Soviet State. Before the 1920s the location was known as the Upper Trading Rows.
As of 2021, GUM carries over 100 different brands,[1] and has cafes and restaurants[2] inside the mall.
Moscow GUM
Design and structure
With the façade extending for 794 ft along the eastern side of Red Square, the Upper Trading Rows were built between 1890 and 1893 by Alexander Pomerantsev (responsible for architecture) and Vladimir Shukhov (responsible for engineering). The trapezoidal building features a combination of elements of Russian medieval architecture and a steel framework and glass roof, a similar style to the great 19th-century railway stations of London. William Craft Brumfield described the GUM building as "a tribute both to Shukhov's design and to the technical proficiency of Russian architecture toward the end of the 19th century".[3]
The glass-roofed design made the building unique at the time of construction. The roof, the diameter of which is 46 ft, looks light, but it is a firm construction made of more than 50,000 metal pods (about 819 ST), capable of supporting snowfall accumulation. Illumination is provided by huge arched skylights of iron and glass, each weighing some 820 ST and containing in excess of 20,000 panes of glass. The facade is divided into several horizontal tiers, lined with red Finnish granite, Tarusa marble, and limestone. Each arcade is on three levels, linked by walkways of reinforced concrete.
History
See also
- TsUM (Moscow), another large department store in Moscow.
- Passage, a department store in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Sources
- Brumfield, William Craft (1991) The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, ISBN 0-520-06929-3
- English, Elizabeth Cooper (2000). "Arkhitektura i mnimosti": The origins of Soviet avant-garde rationalist architecture in the Russian mystical-philosophical and mathematical intellectual tradition", a dissertation in architecture, University of Pennsylvania
- Hilton, Marjorie L. (2004). "Retailing the Revolution: The State Department Store (GUM) and Soviet Society in the 1920s". Journal of Social History, (Oxford University Press) 37 (4): 939–964; 1127.
- Rainer Graefe, Jos Tomlow: "Vladimir G. Suchov 1853–1939. Die Kunst der sparsamen Konstruktion." 192 S., Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1990, ISBN 3-421-02984-9
External links
References
- All stores of GUM gumrussia.com, retrieved 2020-10-14^
- Cafes and restaurants in the main department of the country gumrussia.com, retrieved 2020-10-14^
- William Craft Brumfield. The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture University of California Press, 1991^