![Image](http://www.cwbkc.com/Portfolio/Portfolio/%7B4FC9537A-E3FD-443A-82AF-EC135E70A0ED%7D.jpg)
I think on a scale of 1-10 just about any building with a parking podium set-up on a main street immediately loses 6 points. Those things are fugly. Ground level retail helps, but it's no cure all. At street level, you end up noticing the first 5 stories the most, so having the ground level be retail, with the next 3-4 stories parking is pretty annoying (in fact in Chicago, which has had a rash of these kinds of buildings in this last boom they are hated. There are even talks of ordinances against it.)
What ends up happening, as you walk down a street, is that you have a sense of dead space right above the street, and then activity a couple of stories up (which you can't perceive or see because it's already too high). By activity i mean curtains are haphazardly open, lights are on, maybe a person or two are at their window, or you see someone working at their desk, it gives that sense of energy, informal interaction, of walking through a working and bustling district). Even if you don't pay explicit attention to these details, they still shape one's sense of a street unconsciously (which is why many Chicago developers have tried to put up fake facades, some even going so far as to try to put in half open curtains in these fake windows..... needless to say it doesn't work, and is even more depressing).
Visually speaking, the layered look of the building (explicitly showing retail, then parking, then office) doesn't do much for me, it looks almost like someone took the parking garage next to the TWA building and plopped an office building on top. Lame.
The fact that the building takes up the whole block because of its parking is also really annoying.
Everything else, style, proportions, etc etc is kind of irrelevant to me without addressing the podium parking issue. When i walk down the street i'll be looking at the first 5 stories off the ground, not this rendering.