If you cycle through Assen or drive along the Vaart, you will immediately see them: buildings that stand out just a little above the rest. But which building is really the tallest in the city? And if you look beyond Assen alone: what is the tallest building in all of Drenthe?
To answer that question properly, we first have to figure out something else: when can you officially call something a ‘building’, and who actually keeps track of that? That turns out to be more important than you might think.
Anyone who wants to designate ‘the tallest building’ must first agree on what a building is. There are clear rules about this. Internationally, the standards of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) are often looked at. That organization applies strict criteria: a building must be intended for human use, have multiple floors and contain a contiguous interior space. This means that transmission towers, individual towers or windmills are eliminated, no matter how high they are.
In the Netherlands, municipalities and the government maintain data via the Basic Register of Addresses and Buildings (BAG), which is managed by the Land Registry. This registration records where each building is located, what it is used for and when it was built. Height is not always stated literally in meters, but in combination with additional data and international lists such as those from CTBUH, it can be determined which buildings are really among the tallest.
If we look at Assen with those criteria, one building clearly stands out above the rest: the police tower on the Balkengracht, also known as the Pettenflat. The building has fourteen floors and can accommodate 400 officers. According to data from the BAG and international high-rise lists, the building is approximately 60 meters high.
Other high buildings in Assen, such as office buildings or flats, remain well below this. Church towers and masts are sometimes higher, but are not included in this comparison because they do not meet the international definition of a building. The conclusion for Assen is therefore clear: this police building is officially the tallest building in the city.
If we apply the same yardstick to the rest of Drenthe, our view quickly ends up outside Assen. The Hondsrugtoren, a residential tower with seventeen floors, is located in Emmen.
According to data from the BAG, the Land Registry and international lists from CTBUH, the building is approximately 65 meters high. This makes it officially the tallest building in the province.
Comparing helps to put that Drenthe height into perspective. The tallest building in the Netherlands is De Zalmhaven in Rotterdam, with a height of 215 meters. That is more than three times as high as the Hondsrug Tower.
If you continue the comparison worldwide, the difference becomes really big. The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, measures 828 meters. The Hondsrug Tower fits more than twelve times in that space.