Many software projects suffer from architecture erosion and architecture technical debt. One challenge is to identify affected parts and prioritize them for refactoring. Architecture smells are indicators of architecture technical debt, but they are not yet well established in practice. Therefore, we built a knowledge base to improve the understanding of architecture smells and identify violated software design principles and affected quality attributes. The design principles help understand the causes of architecture smells, while the impaired quality attributes represent the consequences. We conducted a systematic literature review to identify these relations and build an architecture smells ontology. The ontology provides a knowledge base that architects can use to prioritize the smells according to the project’s individual quality goals.