Descent of affine buildings, I: large minimal angles

In this two-part paper we prove an existence result for affine buildings arising from exceptional algebraic reductive groups. Combined with earlier results on classical groups, this gives a complete and positive answer to the conjecture concerning the existence of affine buildings arising from such groups defined over a (skew) field with a complete valuation, as proposed by Jacques Tits. This first part lays the foundations for our approach and deals with the 'large minimal angle' case