Ground up vs Top down development?

OOP books, especially design patterns like to prompt people to follow the Top down development, that is to create the grand architecture first, then fill in the fine detail in the end. With refactor function in vs.net, I am thinking about the more efficient, ground up development where you design everything that's nice and just enough for your current work but leave the grand architecture for all 'flexibility' for future refactor. e.g. If you dont plan to have multiple-GUI, you dont really need to have the MVC for your project. On the other hand, with MVC tools available, it seems pretty easy to start those 'grand' work.