I get that some foundations do have sinking issues, but how does having a foundation help? If the foundation is poured and solidifies, what stops the weight of the house from immediately sinking/tilting the foundation?
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Nothing stops the weight of the house from sinking the foundation.
But the foundation is designed so it only sinks or tilts a little bit.
There are a few schemes and the type of soil matters a lot. The simplest is a raft foundation. You pour a big mat of concrete and then everything sits on that. The concrete pushes down on a very large area of soil, so it only moves a little bit.
A pile foundation doesn’t sink very much because it has friction along the entire length where the soil and the pile meet.
But if you want to build a really really heavy building, you want to build it over soil – or even better bedrock – that can support that weight. Shifting sand would be bad.
A cartoon of the two most common types of foundations. [https://www.mdpi.com/applsci/applsci-11-03099/article_deploy/html/images/applsci-11-03099-g002-550.jpg](https://www.mdpi.com/applsci/applsci-11-03099/article_deploy/html/images/applsci-11-03099-g002-550.jpg)
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