Spirit of place: Birmingham Central Library and the World Monuments Watch

I've posted critically about Birmingham Central Library before, a building for which I have little praise despite, or because of, the hours I have spent in the reference library over the years poring over various tomes. It tickles me no end that it has been placed on the World Monuments Fund's (WMF) World Monuments Watch of buildings at risk, specifically under the heading of British Brutalism, along with the South Bank Centre in London and Preston bus station, bother seriously sexy brutalist buildings.
The image to left is the one that they're actually using to publicise their campaign and its unfortunate, because it actually shows what's wrong with it now. When it was built the area below the ziggurat in the picture, almost perfectly central to the picture, was open. That was how it was designed to be. Contemporary pictures show how it gave an impression of the library floating above the open space below. In - I think - the 1980s it was filled in completely ruining the one good thing about this building. As a building to study in  it is a disaster. You can tell it was built before the 1970s oil crisis, because it is impossible to read in there by natural light. Its treatment since built by the council has not helped: its poorly lit inside, has not been maintained well, the remaining orange 1970s carpets are not helped by the purple paint that some misguided soul thought would spruce it up. Repeated attempts to get this disaster area listed have rightly failed: it is not special architecturally, and in terms of town planning it literally hisses at the Georgian and Victorian buildings surrounding it. Listing this building would be a disaster because this year the new Library of Birmingham is opening a stone's throw away. I don't like the design, although functionally it cannot possibly be as bad as the present one. I'm hoping they'll have sorted out their catalogue, although ironically I feel that the little-known secret that all of their acquisitions before 1971 never made it on to the computer catalogue for 40 years, so that you still had to look in the card catalogue, may have saved some precious things from being filched.
I also can't think of a conceivable use for the empty building, so if it was listed it would just become a millstone around the council's neck. Don't these people understand that the important Brutalist principle of function dictating form should inform the demolition of buildings with no function anymore? WMF? WTF, more like.