  Let Gamma be the K-shadow space of a spherical building Delta. An embedding V
of Gamma is called polarized if it affords all "singular" hyperplanes of Gamma.
Suppose that Delta is associated to a Chevalley group G. Then Gamma can be
embedded into what we call the Weyl module for G of highest weight lambda_K. It
is proved that this module is polarized and that the associated minimal
polarized embedding is precisely the irreducible G-module of highest weight
lambda_K. In addition a number of general results on polarized embeddings of
shadow spaces are proved. The last few sections are devoted to the study of
specific shadow spaces, notably minuscule weight geometries, polar
grassmannians, and projective flag-grassmannians. The paper is in part
expository in nature so as to make this material accessible to a wide audience.
