Density

How much is going on?

How much is going on on the surface: pattern incidence, applied ornament, layering, and the restraint-to-maximalism range. It is not PALETTE, which carries how color behaves rather than how much incident there is, and it is not STYLE, though several style terms are largely density claims wearing an idiom's name.

Permanent address

/id/axis/density

Why there are no terms yet

Identified after the fact, by the axis critique of 21 August 2026, and it is the one real gap that review found. The source vocabularies keep asking this question and no axis here answers it: a rendering pipeline's patterned, a materials-retrieval system's playful_graphic and decorative_traditional, a furnishings retailer's Eclectic, and an editorial image library's Modern Maximalism against Warm Minimalism - a pair that differs chiefly on density and barely on anything else. The materials-retrieval system already carries ms_pattern_density at MATERIAL scale, which is the obvious seed, but the room-scale question is not the same one: a room of quiet materials can still be dense with incident. Until this exists, maximalism is filed as a style, which flatters it.

Recorded in ADR 0001 section 9 and identified by the crosswalk-residue test in TAX-14.