This paper describes a new architecture for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR), which will be developed within the project FLaVoR (Flexible Large Vocabulary Recognition). The proposed architecture abandons the standard all-in-one search strategy with integrated acoustic, lexical and language model information. Instead, a modular framework is proposed which allows for the integration of more complex linguistic components. The search process consists of two layers. First, a pure acoustic-phonemic search generates a dense phoneme network enriched with meta-data. Then, the output of the first layer is used by sophisticated language technology components for word decoding in the second layer. Preliminary experiments prove the feasibility of the approach.