It has been applied to all manner of people and artefacts in recent times including the late Princess Diana, Damien Hirst's dead sheep, Posh Spice and, in the last four days, to the Concorde aeroplane. Like most journalistic clich es, it will be found on close examination not to mean very much, if anything at all. An icon, an image of Christ or a saint, was originally something that was venerated.
Bridges can certainly be beautiful.
I would be happy to apply the word to the Severn Bridge for one. But I fail to see much beauty in Lord Foster's latest effort, aptly likened by one of its few critics to a stretched- out trampoline. As for the Concorde which passes over my house at regular intervals on its way to New York, it can, I suppose, look quite beautiful when it is high up in the sky, when its menacing, beak-like nose is no longer visible. On the other hand, any beauty in its appearance is more than cancelled out by the truly deafening noise it makes, even at a great height. Beauty ought not to be just in the eye of the beholder, but in the ear as well.