In one exercise I'm doing, it has the following sentence:
世界で一番木の古い建物は法隆寺です。
In this case, the position of the adjective 古い looks odd to me. I normally find it appear before noun or noun phrase, so I think it should be:
世界で一番古い木の建物は法隆寺です。
Is there a mistake with printing or something I should know about here?
Based on the content of that exercise, the sentence has the English translation as follows:
The oldest wooden building in the world.
The two phrases are not identical. The difference is as follows:
The latter simply refers to the oldest building made of wood, which is 法隆寺. The former refers to a building which uses very old tree. Strictly speaking, the building itself does not necessarily have to be old. Yes, if you have 10000-year-old trees, you can use them and start building a 世界で一番木の古い建物 today. (Well, this is a nit-picky discussion; practically speaking, they refer to almost the same thing...)
木の古い建物 is the same as 木が古い建物, which has a relative clause that modifies 建物. If you know how to parse 鼻の長いゾウ, 心が綺麗な人, 背の高い男 and so on, you can parse 木の古い建物 the same way. (See this if you are unsure.)
This appears to be the が to の conversion which happens in relative clauses and attributive clauses. The usual 木が古い gets converted to 木の古い because it is embedded in the clause and is modifying a noun. See below for a similar discussion on this topic:
As for using 木が古い instead 古い木, this is not uncommon when describing some kind of attribute or a personality trait. The format is NounがAdjective where the adjective describes one particular attribute of the noun (but implies there are others).
