Bondage in Fifth Gear teases the boundaries of tension. It explores ways in which architecture can incarnate and enflesh visceral experiences, experimenting with the idea that stimulation could come from an architecture of sensation. The project embraces otherness and provocation, and seeks to give architecture a surreal, sensory and anatomical life; where fat, sinew and bone are structural and experiential. The proposal is a culmination of subcultural poetics drawn from a tectonic investigation of affect as a flirtation between speed and tension. The intertwined worlds of leather and motorcycle culture are embraced in an architecture that investigates a building’s capacity to not only provide stimulation to its inhabitants, but also to itself by interacting with bikes’ speed and force as they ride and bind it. Located within a traffic intersection in Brussels, the project hosts a motorcycle track that performs restraint on the building, a biker’s café, a service workshop and bar. Technical questions raised involve the rerouting of motorcycle traffic into and onto the building, and the possibility of creating the building’s own anatomical logic derived from 1:1 material findings.