View from my office: Andy Speight

How far up are you?

On the 10th floor.

Describe your view?

The picture is taken in the conference facilities of the Axis Building in Birmingham, the local office of Faithful + Gould and parent company Atkins. It houses about 1,000 staff.

The building is adjacent to the Mailbox, to the west of Birmingham city centre, and provides views across the city including the Mailbox and the new Cube development, Beetham Tower, New Street Station, the Bull Ring, the Rotunda and a number of tower cranes developing the sites at Snowhill and Edmund Street in the distance.

The new 26-story Orion scheme dominates the foreground and provides the link between the city centre and the Westside developments of the Mailbox and other new ones nearby.

To the north, the view is dominated by Argent’s Brindleyplace development and the International Convention Centre with the new 50 story Dandara scheme on Arena Central, which is about to start and will regenerate the previous television studios site.

What’s on your desk?

The usual: laptop, screen, keyboard, BlackBerry, phone, a number of items of correspondence needing attention, magazines to read and the obligatory coffee cup.

Have you been on a project with a stunning view? I am not involved with the project personally but colleagues are working on the VTP200 leisure tower in Birmingham for Pettifer Estates.

The 200m tower is a world first and combines observation galleries and family-themed and adrenaline rides. It will also house a 250 bedroom hotel and 15 restaurants and bars at the base of the tower.

What’s your all-time favourite view?

My favourite view is from the top of the former World Trade Centre in New York, which I visited with the RICS a couple of years before the attack.

The scale of buildings in New York is amazing and what I hadn’t appreciated until I visited the city is the variance of low- and high-rise buildings side by side. This occurs using a principle of buying air rights from adjacent sites and, in the process, preventing future vertical development of the disposing site.