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Would "generally representative of Eisenman's philosophy" be a better description?
Why are cheapness, decay, dirt, and squalor unpleasant? Where is the emotional effect coming from? As I mentioned to another answer, imagine that these environments have been made this way on purpose, that the corrosion and the dirt had been applied through painstaking labor to achieve this effect on purpose. Would that make it better for the occupants?
Then too, consider #5. Is it actually dirty or decayed or squalid, or is it only conveying a sense of dirtiness and decay while actually being fairly clean? The latter seems more accurate, does it not?
If you had to rank the photos of the Nikken Sekkei building and its various interior and environments in terms of general goodness, how would you rank them? For me, I'd say Kendo Room > Gymnasium Interior > Pillared underpass > Interior walls > Building Exterior > Hallways >>> Stairwell > Classroom. The classroom in particular is so bad that it is actively offensive that someone built a room like that specifically to put children in. By contrast, some of the shots of the gymnasium interior look legitimately grand, with the strong natural light spilling down the pseudonatural detail of the wall.
The gymnasium interior and the kendo room look reasonably clean in the photos, aided greatly by the polished simplicity of the flooring. The rest of the shots, particularly the classroom, stairwell and hallway shots, look grimy and decaying even though I'm entirely certain they're in perfect condition and clean enough to eat off.
I'm not immune to the appeal here. Some of the shots of the Gymnasium interior actually look quite good. But a lot of the other shots look straightforwardly hideous, and I think that we should consider this a bad thing, for the same reasons that we should prefer our prison cell designs to conform to cell 1 rather than cell 6, and for the same reasons that we should continue to paint our prison cells rather than leaving them bare concrete.
I think it would be morally wrong to choose, for aesthetic reasons rather than practical ones, to inflict the style of the Nikken Sekkei gymnasium on actual prisoners. Would you disagree, or would you argue that prison life would be enriched by such design choices as we see in those photos? And if you agree that it would be wrong to do this to prisoners, why is it better to do it to innocent children?
Combined with the natural color and texture of the concrete, it creates a strong impression of filth, decay and squalor. It's immortalizing trash in stone. Why do that? Of all the textures available, why those?
I'd agree, but then why use the textures in places where they will not be lit to their advantage?
I would certainly prefer that gymnasium interior to the standard white box. But would you rather spend an hour a day in that classroom, rather than a replacement-level classroom? Would you rather trade the hallways and stairwells for their replacement-level equivalents? I would vastly prefer accepting the standard white box gymnasium to not have the rest of that structure inflicted on me. Then too, any gymnasium with a open balcony would be a strict improvement, just for the novel perspective.
If you have time, I'd be interested in your thoughts on the rest of the questions.
I don't think it is generally representative of Eisenman's philosophy, no. It's worth remembering that these two architects are separated by half a century and the pacific ocean, and that gulf encompasses significant aesthetic, philosophical, cultural and technological developments. I don't know a huge amount about Nikken Sekkei other than them being one of those very old mega-firms that built Tokyo tower had their heyday in the 80s, so I can't speak much to a house style or philosophy, but as I mentioned it seems more in dialogue with Ando than Eisenmannian deconstruction, even if both are pursuing a kind of phenomenological minimalism. Japan also has its own aesthetic philosophies against which Japanese architects play and react. Eisenman never struck me as someone with a huge interest in materiality or light, and his work is explicitly antitectonic in places (a result of Derrida-esque attempts to liberate signifier from signified). The gymnasium is thoroughly tectonic and materiality is clearly front of mind, which is why the care is taken to showcase the formwork. Where the gymnasium bears the marks of its construction process, Eisenman's House VI is a house in abstract, the planes of its walls pushed and pulled without caring to represent the construction process, or even to subvert it. The (mild) parametricism is also an aesthetic development contingent on software-led design processes that simply didn't exist in Eisenman's context.
I do agree that there is a sometimes challenging, sometimes productive interplay between what positively evokes nature and what evokes decay, but I don't think it's as straightforward as béton brut surfaces always and necessarily giving a sense of grime, or that grime necessarily is of negative valence. In Tanizaki's essay on Japanese aesthetics, there is a special attention paid to grime:
...
Tanizaki was writing with his tongue in his cheek (much ink is spent on the virtues of wooden toilets), but I do think brutalist structures put decay on an aesthetic knife-edge more than most. I've never seen a brutalist building work when left to impose its monolithic mass on an urban parking lot, but I love how this tension between artifice and nature is completely released in da Rocha's Casa no Butantã. The raw concrete is humanised by surrendering it to the jungle. Appropriately used, decay functions to soften edges, blur boundaries. When homeownership can often feel like a constant, doomed struggle against entropy, a design that reassesses the necessity of this opposition can be incredibly liberating.
I think with your prison cell examples the worst are actually where this tension is amplified, rather than released. I'd certainly find a mess of shit and viscera unpleasant on a dirt cave floor, but would find it significantly more disturbing on broken white tile under fluorescent lights. This is just to illustrate that these qualities, and their humaneness, aren't simple variables to dial up and down, but interplay with each other in context.
Back to the gymnasium, and it wasn't I that picked it as a particular exemplar of anything, I agree that many of the circulation spaces are not particularly inspiring, and the classroom probably the most egregious. But I can see to some extent what they are aiming for, and it is something rather different from what Eisenman pursued. I think it's possible for a design to work in some contexts and not others, and with a design that's on such a knife's edge as this (and I consider it flawed in a few ways), it'd be somewhat miraculous to transport it to a prison typology with the intended effect intact. The one saving grace, if you could call it that, is that the baseline for these environments is already dire. A fancy private school is going to have a slightly different attitude to upkeep as well.
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