Reached by phone this week at his home in Phoenix, Bruce told Crain’s Grand Rapids Business the original idea for the dome house came from a University of Michigan architectural student who showed him a sketch one day.
“He showed me an elevation plan that he had drawn, and he said, ‘Do you think you could build that?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ And so I did quite a bit of research and … (completed) the drawings and so forth from there,” Bruce said. “I didn’t change any of (his original design), I just figured out how to do it.”
Now in his 80s, Bruce is something of a polymath who’s followed his curiosity into different career paths. He started out as a mechanical engineer, then shifted to chemical engineering, then became a polymer chemist and, in mid-life, went to dental school followed by a specialty in orthodontics at the UM.