If I understand what you want to do, you can use view(2) (or more generally, i.e., if it's not always going to be the x-y plane, use set(gca(),'View',[0 90]) but change [0 90] to the view you want). Example:
% a 3D plot
surf(1:10,1:10,rand(10))
% for demonstration only, copy the axes to a new figure
% (you wouldn't need to do this)
copyobj(gca(),figure())
% set the view to X-Y plane
view(2)