In my opinion this is the most beautiful retaining wall in Seattle, residential or civil. It's located on Martin Luther King Jr. Way S and south Hudson. One needs to be moving northbound to see it, or at least see the colored wall treatments. The "tiles" are actually colored reflectors! The patterning suggests a Native American motif, possibly Hopi or Navajo.
The structural design is unique in several ways. First off, the tops of each corner section are small gardens, which gives a wonderful organic balance to an otherwise purely inorganic civil structure. The faces are fluted, which is at least an improvement over a flat, blank wall. This may have been done to discourage graffiti.
Another interesting aspect of the multiple offsets is that it helps to strengthen the wall, in this case not by materials, but by design. Consider a flat piece of paper; if you hold it at one end, the other end will naturally flop down due to the pull of gravity. but if you pleat the paper with multiple folds, forming troughs and peaks, you can now hold out the same piece of paper without it falling over. what you have done is to effectively increase the depth of the "beam." The multiple convolutions in the MLK wall do the same thing! Very clever and very beautiful at the same time!
Here is a close up of the reflectors.
