This, and the few other famous photos and videos of similar operations, confuse me, because it violates my mental model of how buildings work. My mental model is that a modern building has a large, concrete foundation that extends significantly below the ground, and that the foundation is attached to the structural frame of the rest of the above-ground building. Then, how can jacks, whether manual or robotic, raise a building up off of its foundation?

Also, how can they scoot some, but not all, jacks over on any given step, and alternate? I understand that rigidity isn't fully binary, but I figured that buildings were on the more rigid side.