My tower structure is visible from every distance in skyrim:


View from the mountain range above Drela's Cottage (the tower is hard to see behind the clouds, but its directly above the crosshair):

http://i44.tinypic.com/ipxwra.jpg



map view to give you an idea of how far away i am to the tower:

http://i39.tinypic.com/oh78r4.jpg

^ note, you can physically see the actual tower structure in the world map



and on top of that, it is visible within Whiterun's worldspace. View from Dragonsreach:

http://i39.tinypic.com/w1zbcl.jpg




How?

I created a new dedicated LOD static using the winterhold tower's LOD mesh.

Checked the option to "Show in world map"

placed the stat in tamriel, in the exact location as the full-res tower (so that they are overlapping)

on the reference, i checked "full LOD"



it's hit or miss, i got lucky on this one because it doesn't always work. I think it may have to do with the LOD static mesh having collision or not (it should not have any collision)

also the LOD static is an extremely low res low poly, and you need to find a way to "hide" it inside the high-res LOD static, so that when placed one on top of another, the high res version covers the low res one up close. i have yet to find a way to swap out the meshes properly, so for now, they exist one on top of the other. as a rule of thumb, you should be making your LOD meshes with very low poly count anyway, so the performance impact of having both low and high res models active at the same time up close should be relatively minimal.