About Us

 Integral to our creative endeavors is a desire to answer the more general question of what could be better in the next version. For more than three decades, we’ve iterated and improved every one of our designs, from tables legs and benches to completely off-grid housing.

The goal moving forward in housing should be, first to lower the financial barrier to home ownership, and also to raise the quality of houses. I believe the answer to both issues will come from considering the house as a manufactured product.

LanceBuilt is a small, full-service design and build home manufacturer, offering everything from concepts to construction and interior design guidance to furniture creation. Whether you're in the market for dog beds and houses, interior renovations and design, or complete structures, we can help create the housing solutions you need.

Our specialty is stressed-skin panels, with concrete being the most thermally and economically efficient. We believe in it so much that it's what we decided to build our own house out of, which we've been living in since the 2010s. Every major panel of our home, floors, walls, and roof, as well as partition walls, doors, kitchen table, shelves, and stair treads are built as stressed skin panels. The stressed skin panel is an incredibly efficient structural shape that is underutilized in today’s architecture and construction projects, to the detriment of buildings everywhere. Houses are particularly well suited to exploiting the structural, thermal, and importantly fiscal benefits of the stressed skin panel. 

These panels can vary widely in composition and method. Within our home we have built panels with a core of foam, wood and steel truss ribs, and skins of concrete, plywood, flake board, and other sheet goods, all to excellent effect. Some of these were built in place and some were prefabricated and later placed.  

The first floor, suspended on 9 reinforced concrete columns on 20ft centers, is a concrete stressed skin panel 15 inches in depth with 3” concrete skins, and a 9” foam core. It has steel trusses on 2ft centers in one direction with the upper and lower chords of the trusses embedded in each skin, plus additional steel in each skin. This floor is particularly relevant to my plan for a mass producible cementitious next version, as it is a concrete stressed skin panel in active service now for 19 years in the most demanding of application, a suspended floor.

Taking what I’ve learned from our home and looking forward, a house created from prefabricated concrete stressed skin panels could be cast flat, cured, and assembled into houses. These panels will have a foam core, concrete skins, and a generous overall thickness for both strength and insulation. This will take advantage of extraordinary advances in concrete technology in recent decades that have resulted in concretes that drastically surpass traditional concrete in every way, strength, durability, etc. and can be formulated as a self-leveling grout. 

The simplicity of a flat panel cast against a flat surface requiring only edge forms will make for an extraordinarily efficient process. I imagine this as a site made manufactured product, the machinery of production would be trucked in, and after creating a tract of homes, moved to the next location. The future of housing can be here sooner than we think.