Architecture is recognized as a critical aspect in the successful development and evolution of software- intensive systems. Explicitly architecting such systems inevitably involves establishing consensus among different stakeholders' concerns. Unfortunately, there are few established approaches for rapidly prototyping architecture to identify key architectural components during the early stakeholder requirements resolution phases of software design. This paper presents an approach for developing a perspective-based architectural design (PBAD) using rapid prototyping. The approach relies on explicit architecting and system composition to provide a set of rules governing the system composition from coarser-grained components. The approach establishes mappings between perspective designs of recurring architectural facilities that implement compositional patterns. Finally, it provides a rationale for treating dependability as a set of semantic constraints localized on compositional patterns.