GUM Department Store

GUM Department Store occupies the entire eastern side of Red Square in Moscow, completed in 1893 to a design by the architect Alexander Pomerantsev in the Russian Revival style, drawing on medieval Russian church and fortress motifs reinterpreted for a large modern commercial building. Originally known as the Upper Trading Rows, it consists of three long parallel arcades of shops arranged over multiple levels, unified beneath a dramatic glass-and-steel roof engineered by Vladimir Shukhov, whose structural ironwork was itself an early showcase of the lightweight lattice-shell techniques he later applied to towers across Russia. After the 1917 revolution the building was nationalized and eventually renamed GUM, an acronym for the Russian words for State Department Store, and it operated for periods as a state retail center and briefly as government office space under Soviet rule. It reopened fully as a luxury shopping arcade after the Soviet collapse and remains one of the most recognizable commercial buildings in Russia.