When US inventor Theophilus van Kannel began marketing his patented "storm-door structure" in the late 1880s, he boasted it would "save life" by helping the "unfortunate salesman, cashier, or clerk whose duty keeps him near the constantly opening front door" avoid "noxious effluvia" and "baleful miasmas". In other words, his revolutionary revolving door would keep out the undesirables – cold, heat, disease, pollution – that lurk outside.

The Ritz hotel in central London has been employing a revolving door to keep out undesirables since 1944, but this week it announced plans to replace it with a conventional door. During the anti-cuts demonstrations last March, the hotel was vandalised and the hotel now feels that its revolving door is a safety liability because it can be prized open.

It would be a shame if this marked the beginning of the end for the revolving door. Beyond its use as a metaphor, it has been used to great comedic effect in the movies. Charlie Chaplin first noted its potential for visual gags in his 1917 feature The Cure, which included a two-minute sequence involving him being chased inside one by a bellhop.

Revolving doors also serve a useful function – they speed our progress and provide a better buffer from heat or cold – but for James Buzard, professor and head of literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, their significance goes far, far deeper: "They place two or more people in a form of relationship not created by any other apparatus for the movement of bodies through space . . . What ought to occur is a model in miniature of the well-functioning civil polity, a system of co-operative strangers and an equilibrium of individual interests: the enterer's desire for ingress is presumed to counterbalance the exiter's for egress." Quite.

• This article was amended on 27 July 2011 to correct the title of Professor James Buzard of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.