So if you let them choose between being alone (unless they're extraordinarily popular hubs of social life) and hanging out in desolate modernist spaces, they will choose the latter.
The campus has no shortage of social spaces to hang out in, most with more conventional architecture, yet many choose Geisel. I don't think anyone thinks of it as "desolate" - I'm pretty sure that's not the adjective the Trek producers had in mind when they cast it as Starfleet Headquarters in one of the movies. At the top floors of the inverted pyramid, 360 degrees of glass result in a spectacular view... at sunset it's downright romantic. The stacks up there are a popular place for the undergrads to lose their virginity (or so I've heard).
at best, it means that the architect has taken advantage of an extraordinary location to achieve that.
The location alone just gets you a few rooms on one side with a view. Here though, an amazing amount of thought was put into how to lay things out so that everybody gets a view.
By the way, can you open a window in these ocean-view rooms?
I can't say for sure, as I never worked in that building. But I suspect that they do open - the building across the street from it where I used to work was also brutalist (though much less impressive), and its windows opened.
OK, since I'm writing this on LW after all, I guess it's time to recognize that I've long passed the boundary from rational argument to an impassioned propagandistic defense of my own view in a value- and taste-laden controversy.
I've never seen these buildings that you describe, so I can't make any final judgement about them. It could be that these are indeed some genuine cases of modernist architecture working well, though I still suspect that it's a matter of having such a spectacularly good space that it's extremely hard to ruin it even with the uglies...
EDIT: This post is pretty flawed, but please read the comments anyway: I'm hoping to rework it into something that catches the idea better.
You can view a lot of value differences along a pro-nice/anti-nice spectrum.
Pro-nice people (I'm one) gravitate to obviously pleasant, lovely, happy experiences. We like kittens and puppies and rainbows. We like transparently "happy" music and transparently "beautiful" works of art and literature. (If you like Romantic poetry and science fiction, but not contemporary novels, you might be pro-nice.) We prefer the positive social emotions, like sympathy, encouragement, and teamwork. We may choose intellectual interests based on the fact that they make our brains feel good. We tend to be drawn towards proposals for making the world wonderful.
Pro-nice people aren't quite the same thing as optimists. An optimist tends to anticipate that things will turn out well, or look on the bright side. But pro-nice people may well hold pessimistic ideas or have melancholy temperaments. Pro-nice is a preference for the positive. A typical pro-nice attitude is "Humanity may be destructive and cruel, but the one time when we're at our best is when we're doing science. Science is lovely. I think I'll be a scientist."
Anti-nice people have a preference for the difficult. They find pro-nice preferences saccharine. They like artistic expressions that have a challenging or negative "mood." They prefer the negative social emotions, like antagonism, sarcasm, and cynicism. They dislike things that have obvious appeal, or things that everyone finds pleasant. As far as social issues go, they take a keen interest in potential catastrophes and what must be done to avert them; they generally aren't drawn to proposals to "make the world a better place."
Again, anti-nice people aren't necessarily pessimists or unhappy people. Anti-nice people prefer to direct their attention to the challenging, the problematic, the worst-case scenario. To an anti-nice person, there's nothing interesting to work on when everything is going smoothly; just liking things or agreeing with people or being contented is rather dull.
I suspect that a lot of conflict can be summarized by the clash between pro-nice and anti-nice personality types.
Are you pro-nice or anti-nice? Have you experienced difficulty communicating with the other type?