Classical object properties such as encapsulation ease the construction of distributed systems. The object paradigm supports modeling of real world problems in a natural way and delivers units of distribution to the resource management level. To enhance the performance of distributed systems, more detailed application-specific information like potential communication dependencies should be exploited. To fulfill this requirement, we propose a top-down driven, language-based approach to construct structured distributed systems. We introduce the object-based distributed programming language INSEL, that supports advanced structuring concepts. Structural dependencies between passive and active objects are determined at the application level and exploited by the resource management system to transform INSEL programs into efficient executables.