We relate some features of Bruhat-Tits buildings and their compactifications to tropical geometry. If G is a semisimple group over a suitable non-Archimedean field, the stabilizers of points in the Bruhat-Tits building of G and in some of its compactifications are described by tropical linear algebra. The compactifications we consider arise from algebraic representations of G. We show that the fan which is used to compactify an apartment in this theory is given by the weight polytope of the representation...

We show that the group of type-preserving automorphisms of any irreducible semiregular thick right-angled building is abstractly simple. When the building is locally finite, this gives a large family of compactly generated abstractly simple locally compact groups. Specialising to appropriate cases, we obtain examples of such simple groups that are locally indecomposable, but have locally normal subgroups decomposing non-trivially as direct products, all of whose factors are locally normal.