Bondage in Fifth Gear is about teasing the boundaries of pleasure. It seeks new, unexpected pleasures by exploring the idea that stimulation could come from an architecture of sensation. The project embraces otherness and provocation, and seeks to give architecture a surreal and sensual life. The proposal is a culmination of fetishist poesies drawn from a tectonic, mechano-erotic investigation of pleasure and sensuality; a flirtation between speed and intimacy. The intertwined worlds of leather and motorbike culture are embraced in an architecture that investigates the capabilities of a building to not only provide pleasure to its inhabitants, but to also pleasure itself by interacting with the bikes’ speed and force as they ride and bind it.

The project is sited in a traffic intersection in Brussels and hosts the following: a motorbike track that performs bondage on the building, a workshop for bike service, a biker social-club café, and a leather bar. Technical questions raised involve the rerouting of motorbike traffic into and out of the building, and the possibility of creating its own bondage-responsive anatomical logic derived from erogenous 1:1 material findings.