Abstract. We propose Architectural Design Rewriting (ADR), an approach to formalise the development and reconfiguration of software architectures based on term-rewriting. An architectural style consists of a set of architectural elements and operations called productions which define the well-formed compositions of architectures. Roughly, a term built out of such ingredients constitutes the proof that a design was constructed according to the style, and the value of the term is the constructed software architecture. A main advantage of ADR is that it naturally supports style-preserving reconfigurations. The usefulness of our approach is shown by applying ADR to SRML, an emergent paradigm inspired by the Service Component Architecture. We model the complex operation that composes several SRML modules in a single one by means of suitable rewrite rules. Our approach guarantees that the resulting module respects SRML’s metamodel.