[eschaton]

While I like a beautiful building as much as anyone else, quite honestly in a well-designed pedestrian environment - such as a European narrow street - people's eyes drift above the street level very infrequently. The upper floors might as well be invisible in a lot of cases.

In terms of being an inviting pedestrian environment, it's much more important that development is finely-grained - that there are lots of smaller residential buildings and storefronts - than it is for the building itself to be a work of art.