I think what's a terrible idea is pegging people to specific locations. That used to be necessary to find someone in the office but nowadays we have other tools to discover each other's locations.
Instead of binding people to locations, I'd much rather bind activities/moods to locations, e.g.
- the studious space: hushed atmosphere like a library, NO TALKING, for people actively working on brain problems
- the collaboration space: when you need to huddle with a few other people and solve a problem out loud
- the audio privacy space: small rooms for remote conferences where you're the only participant
- etc.
What's important is to have extra monitors in all these spaces, so a decent work setup can be had anywhere.
As a compromise, what's been working in our own office is that the open plan is—with rare exceptions—the "Library": very quiet talking, if any. For the super quiet, that's the Home Office. And for all the rest, we have conference rooms which are all equiped with very large screen telepresence equipment and which supports wireless screen sharing. So anytime we need to make noise, we have what we need. And for those who need some momentary privacy on their own, we have Audio Privacy Rooms with are set up with 1 armchair, small table and video phone. (Disclaimer: I work for the Collaboration group at Cisco so we're eating our own dog food and have easy access to it; I do realize these things do have a cost.)