At the World of Concrete in Las Vegas, Yoshiyuki Hayakawa, founder and president of Long Home Co. Ltd, pushed aside one of his Japanese demonstrators to show me personally how it works. Hayakawa in his yellow sports coat and mischievous smile snapped the sample forms into five different shapes in under 60 seconds. “Anybody can do this,” he says proudly.

This forming system is a hybrid—taking everything we love about the concrete forming systems we have in the U.S. and rolling it into one system. The exterior form is removable while the interior is an insulated stay-in-place panel.

The exterior of the wall typically gets the removable Z-Panel, made of high-strength fiber-reinforced polymer composites. “Most of our contractors use it because of the beautiful finish it provides,” Hayakawa says. He insists the finished concrete is as smooth as the form itself.

You form the interior side of the wall with Z-Board, a stay-in-place insulation and wallboard panel. This one-step finished wall saves time and money. And the light weight of the forms and the simple construction reduce jobsite injuries.

Z-Panels snap together with reusable fiberglass clips. Contractors can use the clips and the Z-Panels over a hundred times, Hayakawa says. “The other forming system manufacturers say you can use their forms a hundred times but I would like to see it against my system,” he says. Even though some of the other options may still be in one piece after a hundred times, they aren’t forming the same wall that they did the first week, he explains.

First introduced in Japan eight years ago, Z-Form debuted in the U.S. this January. It is available through a new U.S. subsidiary in Lake Oswego, Oregon. In just the first short life of Z-Form, it already has an international market and over 200 contractors using the system every day. Hayakawa boasts of hundreds of housing projects built every year with his system in Japan and hopes to have a similar effect on the U.S. market.

Who knows? This system coming to the states just might give concrete construction in the U.S. the momentum it needs to explode in this already promising decade.