Potential Wood Shingles – Automation and Prefabrication in Wooden Shingle Facades

The use of wooden shingles as a traditional building material has a long history in Switzerland, particularly in alpine and rural regions. To this day, their production and installation are largely carried out manually, with little standardization. The process is labor-intensive and heavily dependent on craftsmanship. On the one hand, this leads to high production costs and limits their use in contemporary construction—despite the aesthetic, ecological, and functional qualities of wooden shingles. Compared to more industrialized façade systems, there is a lack of economically competitive alternatives that combine the design potential of wooden shingles with current requirements for efficiency, prefabrication, and planning reliability.

While many steps in shingle production are already mechanized or partially automated, there is a clear lack of approaches for the automated prefabrication and installation of wooden shingle façades or shingle-based interior elements. This is precisely where digital design and fabrication processes offer significant potential: industrial robots can be used for the precise assembly of complex shingle structures. Feedback loops enable continuous quality control during the fabrication process, even when working with irregularly shaped components. Parametric design and planning methods further allow for increased complexity in form and construction, as well as the efficient generation of precise production data for direct machine control.

In addition, the modular prefabrication of shingle elements offers the opportunity to significantly reduce on-site assembly time and improve execution quality. This is where the present project comes in. Its goal is to investigate the potential for the (partial) automation and prefabrication of shingle production.