The earlier book was intended to give a short, friendly, elementary introduction to theory, accessible to readers with a minimal background.Moreover, it approached buildings from only one point of view, sometimes called the “old-fashioned” approach: A building is a simplicial complex with certain properties.
Kenneth S. Brown has been a professor at Cornell since 1971. He received his Ph.D. in 1971 from MIT. He has published many works, including Buildings with Springer-Verlag in 1989, reprinted in 1998.
Peter Abramenko received his Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of Frankfurt, Germany. He held various academic positions afterwards, including a Heisenberg fellowship from 1998 until 2001. Since 2001, he is Associate Professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He has previously published Twin Buildings and Applications to S-Arithmetic Groups for the Lecture Notes in Mathematics series for Springer (1996).