Vilas Hall before its time? Or past its prime?

Am I the only denizen of Vilas Hall who thinks the architecture of this place is straight out of Logan's Run? I mean, I know UW-Madison had its little brutalist architecture phase in the 1970s and all, but Vilas just seems to capture that "futuristic" aesthetic a little more than, say, the Humanities Building (which evokes more the feel of a prison, or perhaps the original Battlestar Galactica, for me).

There are indeed some things about Vilas I like. The big accessibility ramp from University Avenue lets me park my bike up away from the street, and the wide useless entry plaza allows me to bypass the bike racks and instead steal some covered space to lock it up. I like the fact that we can open our own windows when diesel fumes come through our HVAC system, unlike in, say, Helen C. White Hall (another Logan's Run candidate). But the fact that the building basically sits on stilts confuses me. What is that promenade for, exactly, besides smoking and not skateboarding?

The awkwardness of the design is easily seen in the fact that even the newly-revised internal map signage by the elevators is hopelessly confusing (especially the second floor map, which inexplicably reproduces some but not all of the other floors as well). At least our new Journalism Reading Room is looking both functional and comfortable right now, and this has had the spin-off benefit of moving some tables into the 5th floor waiting area which were immediately appropriated for ad-hoc group projects.

This brings me to the question I was going to ask of Vilas folks, both student and faculty/staff: Where do you prefer to work? Out in the open? In your shared or solo offices? In our computer labs? In the JRR? In the Nafziger? Other secret places? Where should we be directing our limited technological and architectural humanization efforts? Where do our communities grow?