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Opposite the Kremlin and facing Red Square
is a huge building, erected in 1890-1894 for the "Trade stalls" to
replace the very old one which dated from 1595 and had become unsafe, though it
had been restored the last time in 1815 by Bove (Beauvais). For centuries this
area and the Red Square had been the main Moscow trade center, though this was
often not to the liking of the grand dukes and tsars, whose main entrance to
their Kremlin palaces was just opposite. One reason for building new
"Stalls" under the roof was to eliminate the practice of trading at
the square itself. The building is presently known as GUM, an abbreviation for
Gosudarstvenii Universalnii Magazin (State department store), and it was
designed by a professor of the Academy, A. N. Pomerantsev. He won a first prize
for it, though he did not follow the conditions of the special commission,
established to clean the area and take care of the construction, which demanded
"Sparing construction expenditures and elegance in architectural
forms." Nevertheless, Pomerantsev used marble and granite and decorated
the exterior of the building with several old Russian elements, primarily
borrowed from ancient Rostov architecture. A novelty was the great use of iron,
reinforced concrete and glass, with which the roof of this huge building was
covered. The latter work being that of an engineer, V. G. Shukhov. Among the
photos of GUM on our Moscow section are this
one and this
one plus several from inside.
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