GUM (Main Department Store)

You are at Chorsu Square, and before you stands a building that ended up here not by chance, but by design. By the mid-sixties, modernism was spreading across Tashkent in clusters. In the new city, the first such cluster was Saperskaya Square, and in the old city, it was Akhunbabayev Square, where several modern structures were immediately planned: a design institute, a high-rise hotel, and the Main Department Store (GUM). GUM became the third and largest modernist department store in the city - and the only one built in the very core of the Old Town. It was designed by the same hands that had completed TsUM two years earlier: Komissar, Freytag, and Pak. Therefore, its layout follows a tried and tested scheme - open access to goods, self-service, escalators between floors, a checkroom, and services for packaging and delivering purchases. There was also a luxury that is hard to imagine in a department store today: a two-hundred-seat auditorium for fashion shows, sharing a stage with a three-hundred-seat restaurant. Fashion shows were conceived as part of the shopping trip. Furthermore, in the initial project, GUM was not alone. According to the design, it was supposed to stand on a shared two-story platform together with a high-rise hotel of twelve or fourteen floors, with a third block featuring a concave reinforced concrete roof wedged between them. The intermediate block was abandoned, the hotel broke away and went its own way - and many years later rose on Chorsu Square as a twenty-story tower, the very one that was demolished in 2025. So GUM and the Chorsu Hotel are, essentially, two halves of a single unrealized vision that drifted apart in time. GUM itself, unlike the hotel, is still standing. True, it is no longer the same: the building was re-clad, and the original facades of the sixties have not survived to our day.