Architecture has been identified as a main tool for high quality system development. It encapsulates the earliest design decisions of the system under development. These decisions constrain heavily the overall design space; therefore it is worth emphasis on the reasons behind architectural choices. Methods for architecting have been suggested by various researches. Unfortunately, they fail to achieve frameworks that can reason on the strong relationship between general system goals and the decisions that are made to fulfill those requirements. In this paper, we have three major contributions: (i) We introduce a general framework for the architectural design cycle. This framework describes an iterative process that assists in transforming system-wide goals into effective architectural description that satisfies the main requirements. (ii) We show, how the prioritizations among goals and environmental constraints have major impact on the resulting architecture. In addition, we demonstrate that the ordering of design decisions greatly affects what kind of structure is created. We describe, how properties of earlier design decisions constrain the available design space and the concerns emerging from the current design guide the selection of next design choices. (iii) We investigate how this framework can be adapted in a concrete design example. We conclude that using this model we can improve traceability, support trade-off decisions and record design rationale.