  In 2000, M. Burger and S. Mozes introduced universal groups acting on trees
with a prescribed local action. We generalize this concept to groups acting on
right-angled buildings. When the right-angled building is thick and irreducible
of rank at least 2 and each of the local permutation groups is transitive and
generated by its point stabilizers, we show that the corresponding universal
group is a simple group.
  When the building is locally finite, these universal groups are compactly
generated totally disconnected locally compact groups, and we describe the
structure of the maximal compact open subgroups of the universal groups as a
limit of generalized wreath products.
