A distributed system is made of interacting components. The current manual, ad-hoc approach to composing them cannot ensure that the composition is correct, and makes it difficult to control performance. The former issue requires reasoning over a high-level specification; the latter requires fine control over emergent run-time properties. To address this, we propose the Varda language (a work in progress) to formalize the architecture of a system, i.e., its components, their interface, and their orchestration logic. The Varda compiler checks the architecture description and emits glue code, which executes the orchestration logic and links to the components. The Varda system relies on a generic interception mechanism to act upon distribution-related system features in a transparent and uniform manner. Varda also takes into account important non-functional system properties, such as placement.