Hordes of students shuffle listlessly through labyrinthine corridors, scale cold concrete and metal staircases and gaze glassy-eyed at windowless ceilings and walls. All the while, muddy echoes of distant music reverberate from the walls in a series of discordant notes.
Welcome to the George L. Mosse Humanities Building.
Now a notorious feature of the UW-Madison landscape, the seven-story Humanities building is a unique architectural product of the 1960s that in all likelihood will be razed before it reaches the age of 50.
UW-Madison Director of Planning and Landscape Architecture Gary Brown said the Humanities building is typical of an architectural style popular from the 1950s through the 1970s characterized by sharp edges and bare concrete.
\The building is very brutal and stems out of a time when architects were actually into Brutalist architecture,"" Brown said.
Humanities was conceived as an answer to the inadequate and overcrowded facilities for the art, history and music departments in the early 1960s. The university settled on a plan to house the three departments in a single 333,000 square foot behemoth.
Humanities still houses the three departments, but Brown said the future of the building is grim.
""It consistently has heating, ventilating and air conditioning problems,"" Brown said. ""Its exterior building skin is deteriorating and many of the windows are problematic.""
Brown said several major repairs have been made to the heating system over the years and because the building's mechanical systems are built into the original concrete structure, they are difficult to maintain.
Humanities is slated for removal sometime during the next decade, near the end of wide-scale campus renovations.
""On the site of the Humanities building itself, we are discussing potential new underground parking with two smaller buildings above: a classroom building and a new building for the humanities,"" Brown said.
UW-Madison alumna and marching band veteran Lisa Kietzer strolls through the crowded halls of Humanities. Kietzer spent long hours during her student career practicing her cymbals in the heart of the building.
""It's dark, it's grey, it's dingy,"" Kietzer said. ""You've gotta love it.\
