OSIRIS (Optical System for Imaging and low/intermediate-Resolution Integrated Spectroscopy) and EMIR (InfraRed MultiObject Spectrograph) are instruments designed to obtain images and low resolution spectra of astronomical objects in the optical and infrared domains. They will be installed on Day One and Day Two, respectively, in the Nasmyth focus of the 10-meter Spanish GTC Telescope. This paper describes the architecture of the Data Acquisition System (DAS), emphasizing the functional and quality attributes. The DAS is a component oriented, concurrent, distributed and real time system which coordinates several activities: acquisition of images coming from the detectors controller, tagging, and data communication with the required telescope system resources. This architecture will minimize efforts in the development of future DAS. Common aspects, such as the data process flow, concurrency, asynchronous/synchronous communication, memory management, and exception handling, among others, are managed by the proposed architecture. This system also allows a straightforward inclusion of variable parts, such as dedicated hardware and different acquisition modes. The DAS has been developed using an object oriented approach and uses the Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE) to be operating system independent.