GUM
— — a glass roof catching Moscow's short winter light.
Not only on a wall.
“A department store the length of two football pitches, set down across Red Square from the Kremlin. The glass roof is Vladimir Shukhov's, a steel-and-iron canopy from 1893 still doing what it was made to do. Three parallel arcades, a fountain at the crossing, the same vanilla ice cream sold since the Soviet years. The shops have changed; the building has not.
GUM, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
GUM stands on the eastern side of Red Square in central Moscow, directly opposite the Kremlin wall. The building runs 242 metres along the square and rises three storeys, holding three parallel arcades joined by walkways. It was finished in 1893, replacing the older Upper Trading Rows. The façade is the work of Alexander Pomerantsev; the glass-and-steel roof belongs to the engineer Vladimir Shukhov. Restored after Stalin's death and privatised in the 1990s, GUM now houses luxury retailers around the central fountain that has anchored the building for over a century.
The roof is the building's argument. Vladimir Shukhov, the engineer who would later raise the Shabolovka radio tower, used arched steel trusses and roughly twenty thousand panes of glass to span the three arcades without internal columns. The exterior is finished stone and pressed brick in the Russian Revival style, Pomerantsev's nod to the seventeenth-century terem palaces. The fountain at the central crossing dates to 1906 and is one of Moscow's standing meeting places. The interior light, on a bright winter day, has the quality of a covered street rather than an indoor mall.
GUM keeps a strict ceremonial calendar. The winter illumination goes up before Orthodox Christmas and stays through early February; an outdoor skating rink is set up on Red Square against the building's western face. The fountain runs from spring through autumn. The Soviet-era vanilla ice cream, still served from old-style carts, is part of any visit. The state department store survived two regimes and a privatisation; the rhythms have softened but not changed. Closing time is late, the security is unhurried, and the crowds thin sharply in the last hour.