This small apartment building on Centre Avenue is named for its most obvious and distinctive feature: a two-storey Doric colonnade that has just been freshly painted.
Addendum: According to the city architectural inventory (PDF), the Colonnade was built in 1907.
The colossal columns of the Mellon Institute illuminated from within.
Behind the world’s largest monolithic columns on the porch of the Mellon Institute.
The Mellon Institute, designed by the prolific Benno Janssen, claims the largest monolithic columns in the world. Columns like these are usually made as a series of joined cylinders, but each column here is a single piece of stone. When the client wants to send the message “I spent money on this,” nothing is more effective than giving him the world’s largest something-or-other.
Note how, unlike most other monumental buildings in Oakland, the Mellon Institute has retained the sooty evidence of decades of heavy industry.
