A structural wall designed to hold back soil and prevent erosion, providing stability for sloped terrain and creating usable level areas.

A retaining wall is a structural wall designed to hold back soil, rock, or other materials to prevent erosion and slope failure while creating stable, level areas for construction or landscaping purposes. These essential engineering structures resist lateral earth pressures through their mass, reinforcement, or specialized design, enabling the creation of terraced landscapes, basement excavations, roadway cuts, and other applications where natural or artificial slopes must be stabilized. Retaining walls are fundamental components in site development, infrastructure projects, and landscape architecture where topographical challenges require engineered solutions to manage soil retention, water drainage, and structural stability while providing safe, functional, and aesthetically pleasing results in residential, commercial, and public construction projects.

Retaining walls are utilized in various construction and landscaping applications including residential projects where walls create level yards, support driveways, and enable construction on sloped lots, commercial and industrial developments where walls provide stable building pads and manage site grading, transportation infrastructure including highway cuts, bridge abutments, and railway embankments where walls support roadways and prevent soil movement, waterfront construction where seawalls and bulkheads protect shorelines and create usable land areas, landscaping projects where decorative walls create terraced gardens, planters, and outdoor living spaces, and utility installations where walls protect underground infrastructure and provide access to buried systems. Each application requires specific wall types and design considerations appropriate to the soil conditions, loading requirements, and aesthetic objectives.

The types and construction methods for retaining walls include gravity walls that rely on their mass and weight to resist soil pressure, typically constructed from stone, concrete, or concrete blocks, cantilever walls using reinforced concrete with a vertical stem and horizontal footing that provides stability through structural design rather than mass, counterfort walls that incorporate buttresses or counterforts to provide additional support for tall walls, anchored walls using tiebacks or soil anchors to provide additional resistance to lateral forces, mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) walls using geosynthetic reinforcement within the retained soil mass, segmental retaining walls (SRW) using interlocking concrete blocks with geogrid reinforcement, and specialty walls including crib walls, gabion walls, and living walls that combine structural function with specific aesthetic or environmental objectives. The selection of wall type depends on height requirements, soil conditions, loading, and project constraints.

Fun Fact: The oldest known retaining walls date back over 4,000 years to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, where massive stone walls were built to create terraced agriculture and protect settlements from flooding along rivers.

• Segmental Retaining Wall
• Cavity Wall
• Cripple Wall