The Building Heights of the Netherlands

Bert Spaan's Netherland's Building Age Map, created for the Waag website, is one of my favorite interactive maps. This map visualizes the age of a staggering 9,866,539 buildings in the Netherlands. The amount of data visualized on this map is very impressive in itself but its use of distinct colors for buildings of different construction ages means that the map also has a very striking visual impact.  

The Netherlands Building Height map is a similarly impressive interactive map. On this interactive map all Dutch buildings are colored, not to show their year of construction but to visualize their height. All the buildings are also displayed in 3D, which gives an additional visual clue to their relative heights. If you want to find out a building's exact height you can also click on its 3D model on the map.

The Netherlands Building Height map uses data and 3D building outlines from TU Delft's 3D BAG. This is an open 3D building data set which covers the whole of the Netherlands.This data was also used to create Parallel's Netherlands Building Ages interactive map.

Inspired by Bert Spaan's building age map Parallel used the 3D BAG data to create the Netherlands Building Ages interactive map which shows both the age of 10 million buildings in the Netherlands but the height of those buildings as well. This map makes use of Mapbox's GL extrude property to visualize the height of all the buildings in the Netherlands in 3D. The colors of the buildings on this map however indicate their age. You can also hover individual buildings to learn a its exact year of construction.