Buildings

This text started out as a revised version of Buildings by the second-named author [53], but it has grown into a much more voluminous book. The earlier bookwasintendedtogiveashort,friendly,elementaryintroductiontothet- ory,accessibletoreaderswithaminimalbackground.Moreover,itapproached buildings from only one point of view, sometimes called the “old-fashioned” approach: A building is a simplicial complex with certain properties. The current book includes all the material of the earlier one, but we have added a lot. In particular, we have included the “modern” (or “W-metric”) approach to buildings, which looks quite di?erent from the old-fashioned - proach but is equivalent to it. This has become increasingly important in the theory and applications of buildings. We have also added a thorough tre- ment of the Moufang property, which occupies two chapters. And we have added many new exercises and illustrations. Some of the exercises have hints or solutions in the back of the book. A more extensive set of solutions is ava- able in a separate solutions manual, which may be obtained from Springer’s Mathematics Editorial Department. We have tried to add the new material in such a way that readers who are content with the old-fashioned approach can still get an elementary treatment of it by reading selected chapters or sections. In particular, many readers will want to omit the optional sections (marked with a star). The introduction below provides more detailed guidance to the reader.