Grandes Galeries du commerce sur la Place Rouge a? Moscou. [The Grand Galleries of Commerce on Red Square in Moscow] First edition

Folio. 29.5 x 38cm. Original gilt maroon cloth, rubbed on edges. Unpaginated. 27 pages, 25 unnumbered leaves of collotype (phototypie) plates.OCLC Number / Unique Identifier:319705355.Facing the Kremlin, the northeast side of Red Square is occupied by the famous Goum department store. Chosen during a competition launched in 1888, the architect Alexander Nikanorovich Pomantsev replaced the shopping arcades which occupied this location with a large building whose monumental facade is clad in Finnish granite, marble and sandstone. With its multiple decorative details borrowed from traditional practice, its design evokes Russian architecture of the 16th and 17th centuries and illustrates the pseudo-Russian taste that Pomantsev was fond of and which was also illustrated in the Igoumov house in the same years. Part of a desire to move away from European academic architecture, this taste intended to revive national practices. With its two small spiers framing the central pavilion (visible on the right in the photograph), the facade of the Goum also refers to the National History Museum, built from 1874 to 1883 on the same square in the same pseudo-Russian style.The interior, on the other hand, has a completely different appearance and is covered by a glass and metal structure which echoes the Crystal Palace built in London for the 1851 exhibition. These "new passages", as the legend calls them on the glass plate, became in 1921, by the will of Lenin, the first Soviet department store before housing administration offices in the 1930s then returning to their store function in 1953.…