KORF

Victor W. “Bill” Korf Jr., former national director of transportation at Omaha-based engineering firm HDR Inc. and former deputy secretary of transportation and chief engineer for the Washington Dept. of Transportation, died on June 9 at age 77 of complications due to cancer. Korf joined the agency in 1956 and was involved in construction of the Seattle Evergreen Point floating bridge. He retired in 1985. At HDR, Korf managed offices in Washington, Arizona and California, and worked with the newly independent Polish government in the 1980s on its first privately funded highway project.

Arthur C. Erickson, the Vancouver, British Columbia-based architect and 1986 winner of the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, died on May 20 in Vancouver. He was 84. Erickson’s design achievements include the campus of 32,000-student Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., the new Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Wash. Erickson resigned from the Architectural Institue of British Columbia in 2005 in a dispute over its continuing education requirements.

Jay P. Bowker, former chief of highway systems at the Federal Highway Administration, who was involved since the 1940s in building the Interstate highway system, died on May 13 in Gaithersburg, Md., of complications from a stroke. He was 96. Bowker joined FHWA’s predecessor, the Bureau of Public Roads, in 1935, while a civil engineering student at the University of Maryland, College Park. He retired in 1974.